Three Useful Features in Zoom for More Effective Virtual Meetings
Recent circumstances have led organizations to switch to using virtual methods to communicate with teammates and conduct meetings with clients. Software like Zoom is an excellent tool to facilitate virtual sessions for clients and internal meetings. Zoom offers a variety of features that may not be commonly used or well-known, which can help to facilitate better meetings and allow attendees to fully participate and collaborate, even in a virtual environment. At C1C, we have used these unique features to help conduct Zoom meetings in an effective and engaging manner. We’ve outlined three of those features below, along with their purpose and some of their benefits.
Zoom offers a variety of features that may not be commonly used or well-known, which can help to facilitate better meetings and allow attendees to fully participate and collaborate.
Small group discussions through breakout rooms. Zoom has capabilities to allow hosts to split participants into breakout rooms. Breakout rooms are separate sessions apart of the original meeting that allow people to interact and discuss with a smaller group of participants. Zoom can handle up to 50 breakout rooms per meeting and is fully functional for both PC and mobile users. Further, these separate sessions have full audio, video, chat, and screen sharing capabilities. The meeting host can choose to manually place participants in select breakout rooms during the meeting or pre-assign them prior to the meeting. The host can also select additional options to customize their breakout rooms, including allowing participants to return to the main room, closing the breakout rooms after a set amount of time, providing a countdown to notify attendees how much time is left until the rooms close, and notifying the host when that time is up. Finally, meeting hosts and co-hosts have the capability to move from breakout room to breakout room to facilitate discussion and ensure small group interactions are going well.
Breakout rooms offer several benefits to virtual meetings. To list a few, they allow participants to contribute in a less intimidating and more comfortable environment through smaller group discussions, compared to having to speak out in a large group. Break out rooms also allow participants to collaborate on multiple tasks at once to accomplish more in a much shorter timeframe. Additionally, small groups can help boost teamwork, promote inclusion by giving another avenue for voices to be heard, and increase collaborative decision making compared to meeting in a larger virtual group. Zoom breakout rooms are an easy and engaging method that can break up the monotony of large group meetings and encourage greater participation and discussion.
Annotating on shared screens or whiteboards. Next, Zoom has a feature that allows participants to annotate on a shared screen or write on a whiteboard. This feature enables participants to type, write, draw, or make marks over a currently shared screen, or on a blank white screen, similar to a whiteboard. Once enabled, participants have access to annotation controls by clicking either annotate, if a screen is shared, or whiteboard. There are several options available to participants, including typing text, drawing, adding symbols, and erasing one’s own markings. The participant that shared their screen or started the whiteboard can enable or disable annotations at any time or make annotations anonymous.
The annotate feature allows participants to document and transfer their ideas onto a screen for everyone in the session to see. It allows for participants to actively engage in the meeting and contribute to the conversation and on the screen, even when not face-to-face and without physical materials like whiteboards and sticky notes. Any annotations made can be saved by the host as a screenshot to be reviewed and further documented later. Annotation is a great feature to use in a virtual environment to enable collaboration and idea sharing between participants.
Surveying attendees through polls. Finally, meeting hosts can make use of single- or multiple-choice polls within Zoom to garner the opinions and feedback of everyone attending the meeting. When the host launches a poll, everyone in the meeting receives a popup window with the poll question and answer options. Attendees will be able to submit their answers to the poll while the host sees the results be tabulated in real time. Polls can be set up before the meeting to collect planned information or during the meeting to allow hosts to remain flexible and agile to the direction of the meeting throughout.
Polling is a useful feature on Zoom as the host can get anonymous or non-anonymous feedback from participants, which will allow participants to express their opinions and choices freely. Polling also allows participants to come to a consensus on an idea or decision without the additional time spent through discussion. Those that are less inclined to speak up in a meeting have an alternative method to voice their opinions in a manner that may be more comfortable to them. Polling is an innovative method to quickly get a group’s collective opinion on a given topic.
These three Zoom features are innovative methods to host meetings in a virtual environment. They get participants involved, allow them to feel heard, and increase engagement in meetings. As you begin to use these features in your own meetings, please keep in mind some of these features will need to be enabled in the settings area of your Zoom account. If you have any questions regarding these unique features, feel free to reach out!