ZOOM has eased the transition of working remotely during the COVID-19 crisis tremendously. One of the most impressive aspects of the ZOOM is how it has answered the call for the astronomical demand for its free service.

As ZOOM becomes the new norm for conducting virtual meetings, here are some of our most helpful tips to help you host your ZOOM meetings. 

Create and share meeting recordings – Recording a meeting is ideal for later reference. Instead of repeating parts of the presentation, recapping, or note-taking, you can record the session in its entirety. Then you distribute it to people who couldn’t attend or send it off to participants so they can refer back to it.

Share your screen – You probably know you can share your screen in ZOOM, but beyond just your slides, participants can see any document or spreadsheet, display, media, or anything else you would like to share. But remember, when you share your screen, participants can view every window, so be sure and close any confidential or unrelated windows and documents before you start your meeting or share your screen.

Involve your participants – To make sure all of your employees or participants are actively engaged, be sure to ask questions randomly and call on people to participate. If they appear on video, you may think they are there, but ZOOM lets people change their background. Some employees are setting a picture or video of themselves while they are doing something else and are not actually present.

Utilize universal mute functionality – Background noise from participants can be overwhelming for everyone. By implementing ZOOM’s universal mute feature, you gain control over the conversation and can unmute individual microphones as needed so attendees can still participate.

Avoid being “ZOOM-bombed” – The phenomenon of having an unwanted person in your meeting is now known as being “ZOOM-bombed.” Unfortunately, uninvited guests crashing virtual meetings is a trend that is gaining popularity as more and more meetings are being held online. 

All a participant needs to join a ZOOM meeting is the URL of the meeting. Anyone you send the URL to can easily forward it to other people, who can then forward it to additional people. This is a security feature we expect ZOOM to address to protect all meeting participants, but in the meantime, there are several safeguards you can put in place.  

To only allow in specific people, you can set up a “waiting room” and then approve attendees one-by-one. For larger meetings, you can remove a participant by hovering over their name in the participant’s name and clicking “remove,” if they are unknown or being inappropriate. You can also choose the “Lock Meeting” function in the participant pane so they cannot re-enter. Keep in mind that no one else can enter once the host locks the meeting. 

We’re always here to help.