Successful Meetings Using Teleconferencing Services

Here are 10 tips for successful phone etiquette that will insure your conference calls go smoothly. As most anyone who has conducted a small conference call knows, it can be a bit of a pain when several people get together and try to jam with their ideas, and all of them start speaking at the same time. You have to establish codes of conduct with your callers beforehand to ensure that your conference goes off smoothly, and this is especially important when using teleconferencing services and doing meetings involving large numbers of people.

1) Open with the meeting's facts - at the start of the meeting you should, as the host, identify the purpose of the meeting, it's estimated length of time, and any agendas you intend to cover for the duration of the meeting. This sets the proper theme and gets people's minds focused on what's going on. Be factual and straight to the point with this, as it also helps you to establish your authority and maintain discipline through the conference's duration.

2) Keep an eye on the roster - open the conference with a roll call asking everyone to identify themselves, and keep an accurate count of the number of participants. If anyone leaves the conference ask them to keep with an SOP of announcing that they're signing off so you can keep an accurate tally of the number of active participants. If anyone likewise joins the conference in it's middle they should announce their identities on joining. This becomes especially useful if you need to call a vote, so you'll know if you have enough of a majority of the meeting's original participants still active enough to make a vote valid.

3) Establish if anyone is recording the call - if anyone is recording the call in lieu of taking a minutes of the meeting on paper, they should announce that they are doing so, just in case any of the other participants have any aversions to being audibly recorded. Some teleconferencing services may offer assistance with this.

4) Identify yourself before you speak - encourage everyone to identify themselves before they speak up. This is especially important when you've got dozens of people with similar sounding voices in on your conference. Even in a relatively small six to ten man conference keeping this practice up helps people identify the various participants.

5) Mute when not speaking actively - anyone with a mute option should use it when they aren't contributing to the conference. This keeps the chatter down and also minimizes background noise. There's few things more disruptive to the flow of a meeting than hearing a sudden shriek from someone on a speakerphone or wearing a headset just because someone in the same room as them decided to poke them in the ribs for fun.

6) Dont use the Hold button - in connection with the option above, anyone with a hold button should avoid using it during the conference. It can be pretty annoying to have canned music or a rhythmic beep-beep noise in the background of your conference. It can be especially disruptive of two or more people do this at the same time...

7) Don't take cell phones to the conference - cellular telephones are a no-no. Anyone receiving an SMS or phone call will provide lots of background noise that everyone else doesn't really need to hear. Furthermore, even keeping cell phones on silent is not enough, as if these phones are near the conference call device when they go off, the cellular signal will cause chatter and static noise with most teleconferencing services.

8) Keep the ball rolling - as the host of teleconference, you should encourage participation from everyone. Ask leading questions, fill in "dead air" silences, and come up with additional topics if the current one suddenly falls flat. Like any good host, you should keep the discussions lively and productive, not boring or confrontational.

9) Clarify Things - make sure that everyone knows that they should clarify obscure points or statements to make sure that everyone gets their points. On a similar note, they should spell out vague words and long numbers to make sure everyone gets the provided information accurately.

10) Summarize and set Agendas at the end - finally, close the meeting with a summary of all discussions made, as well as important highlights like any votes taken, conclusions reached, or decisions made. Then, after the summarization, if you have another conference scheduled with the group in the future let people know it's exact date and time, it's agenda, and the estimated participants of that next meeting.

This way you will get the most out of your meeting via teleconferencing services.