Getting More From Your Zoom Meetings

If you’ve ever asked a question to a large group during a videoconference, you know that getting a response isn’t always straightforward. In some instances, a dozen people will try to talk at once. In others, everyone will sheepishly wait for somebody else to speak up. Zoom’s polling feature is a great workaround for this inherent shortcoming. Polling allows you to send a custom survey to all members of a meeting, complete with custom responses for them to select. Once complete, the host will be able to see and share results. If you quickly need to put something to a vote or take the team’s temperature on an issue, polling makes it a breeze. Do note that users designated as hosts or co-hosts for a particular meeting will not be able to participate in surveys.

Eliminate in-meeting busywork with scheduling privileges

Oftentimes, the person who sets up and schedules a Zoom meeting is not the person running it. The usual fix for this is to simply have the person who set up the meeting assign the proper host upon their arrival. While that works just fine, you can eliminate the busywork by granting scheduling privileges to other users. It takes a moment to set up, but if your scheduler can set up meetings on behalf of others, it will make them run with fewer hitches once they begin.

Use extra rooms for added functionality

Zoom also offers waiting rooms and breakout rooms so you don’t have to have all meeting participants in the same virtual space at once. The waiting room features will hold all participants in a holding space (kind of like “The Good Place” waiting room) until the host calls them into the meeting. This is a great tool if, say, you’re conducting a review and want to prepare before inviting the person being reviewed into the meeting. Breakout rooms can be created once a meeting has begun, for small group sessions or other segmented assignments. They can be assigned manually or randomly and left and joined multiple times. Most of all, they allow your virtual meeting space to function a little more like a real-world one.

Communicate with participants for smooth sailing

You can make yourself a true Zoom super user, but that won’t eliminate frustration if you keep your prowess to yourself. Not every user needs to be familiar with every feature, but the more you can do to make things easy for people, the better your meetings will be. As with IRL gatherings, being a great host can make all the difference in the world.

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Amy Vetter is a CPA.CITP, CGMA is an accomplished c-suite executive and board member with deep experience in cloud technology and transformation, creating go-to- market (GTM) strategies to scale businesses nationally and internationally. https://www.amyvetter.com