Posted 05.11.15
Posted by John Eary, Director JEC Professional Services Ltd
The technology for making conference calls is cheap, often free, and easy to use but the adoption of conference calls in social housing, and the public sector in general, has been much slower than in the private sector.
In a recent survey, online conferencing was rated as 'very important' by three times as many private sector employees than those from the public sector.
The basic function of online conferencing tools is to provide an online "meeting room". It uses VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) technology, so an Internet connection is required.
The conferencing market has matured and there are well-established, reasonably priced, collaborative tools that allow audio and video conferencing between team members and the sharing of electronic documents such as spreadsheets and presentations. Most of these tools are self-contained in their requirements and do not impact on an organisation's corporate systems but do allow integration with software office suites e.g. Google Hangouts or Skype for Business.
The conference call is the digital equivalent of a physical meeting. As they involve no travel, conference calls can be held at quite short notice - as it just depends on the availability of the participants. Participants can continue to work on emails and reports when they are not involved in the agenda item without disturbing anyone. 'Virtual meetings' tend to 'keep to the point' and are invariably shorter than their physical equivalent.
Conference meetings should avoid the situation where one or two people are dialling in to a group who are sat together in a meeting room. For the remote participant it is often difficult to hear the other participants, especially those speaking some distance from the microphone. Much better that everyone dials in, even if they are in the same offices so that everyone participates in the same way.
So why are conference calls not used more in the public sectors? People are often resistant to change and there is comfort in sitting with others you know and sub-consciously reading their body language.
JEC Professional Services provides consultancy and project management services for organisation to exploit Digital Technologies effectively.
