Top Tips for Using Collaboration Tools

Me and my team at FOX GROUP Technology and 911 Technology Advisors have been working virtual and remotely using collaboration tools since 2009. I personally have been a part time teleworker since 1982 during my former corporate life.

During the past twenty years, we have studied and benchmarked over 15,000 people from multiple corporations. We have developed tools to measure productivity and also develop telework and virtual organization strategies and technology solutions.

I am providing my top 3 tips from my soon to be released book – "101 Tips for the Virtual Organization".

In the book I highlight the practices, policies, technical, legal and management requirements necessary in order to have long-term successful virtual organization based on our extensive research and analysis over the past twenty five+ years..

1. Tip 1 – Technology - For successful web collaboration meetings, it is important to have at least two monitors, plus a good quality headset. (We prefer wired models as they have more capabilities including sound masking and echo cancellation). The ones we use also have auto answer capabilities tied in to Microsoft Teams which makes it much easier to answer calls with your soft phone application. Ours also automatically adjust volume of music being played if a call comes in which is really handy.

2. Tip 2 – Facilitating Meetings - If you are facilitating or leading a meeting, log in at least 2-3 minutes before the web call starts. This enable you to make sure you are on mute, and your audio and video is working properly so doesn’t impact other people. Preload all of the files that you will be needing before the meeting starts and queue them up on an alternate screen.

3. Tip 3 – Participation - In order to have a more realistic experience and ensure that everyone is engaged and participating, we strong suggest that all participants have use video during the length of the call. We try to have video at least for the introduction. We also find that the best way to interject is to raise hand to get attention. We did an AGM and had people do thumbs up to vote yes, thumb sideway for abstain and thumbs down for no vote.

As always, we welcome your feedback on this blog.

I can be reached at Roberta.Fox@FOXGROUP.ca