threehv

In this day and age the conference call is a fact of life. It may no longer be on the telephone – Skype, VOIP and iChat have seen to that – but a group of geographically disparate people trying to speak without any visual contact is an increasingly common way of doing business. And it has to be said that nothing beats face-to-face contact for getting your point across and getting things done.

Given that, how can you ensure that your conference calls aren’t a massive waste of time?

1. Always treat your call as a meeting
2. Publish an agenda
3. Shut down your email client
4. Shut down your IM client
5. Switch off your phone
6. Start early

Treat the call as a meeting – cos that’s what it is. Yeah, you can’t see their faces and they can’t see you flicking the Vs at the phone but it is a meeting and, if you don’t want it to be a waste of your time, treat it as such.

Publish an agenda – like any meeting you don’t want it to drag on or go off at a tangent. So publish an agenda, circulate it beforehand and, if you can, stick a time limit on each item.

No Email, No IM – they can’t see you and you can see the “unread count” going up and up. It won’t do any harm will it? Well it will. You’re not paying attention and it’s rude. One trick with IM – if you know your attendees addresses you can see their status. Are they online or offline? If they are online are they “available” or “busy”?

Switch off your mobile – Much the same as above – you’re in a meeting, so it’s rude to allow interruptions.

Start Early – I admit it. I’m crap at turning up on time; but most conference calls are in my office (a handy one minute walk from my bed). So even I have no excuse for turning up late. Instead get started a couple of minutes early. Everyone always takes a while shuffling their papers, reading the agenda (you did circulate it didn’t you?) and making smalltalk. So get that out of the way so you can start at 10 on the dot. And get the whole shebang over and done with.

Conference calls will never come close to the effectiveness of a real meeting. But, given that yesterday I spent 7 hours travelling 100 miles (thank you Network Rail), if you can make them work, they are essential to running your business.

Oh, and lastly, if you have the option, choose iChat over Skype. For whatever reason the sound quality is vastly superior.

No point having goals if you’re not going to follow through on them.

So here is my January score-card:

• Revenue. No 10% gain, in fact, it’s down on December. FAIL
• Hours: Averaging about 50 hours a week. FAIL
• Marketing: Outside help contacted, beginnings of a plan is in place. SUCCESS
• People: The last geekup was great, Jeremy and I have plans for a monthly Rails meeting and Northpack gets my name out and about. SUCCESS
• Debt: Total failure. I’m crap at managing my own money (good at the company money though). FAIL
• Car: Smaller car, cheaper petrol bill and I spend the time listening to podcasts, so it’s not entirely wasted. SUCCESS
• Freecycle: Not given anything away this year. I tried but my emails were not reaching their destination for some reason (?). FAIL
• Cooking: Yum. Yup, lots of that, and it’s good. SUCCESS

So a 50% success rate. Must try harder. How are you getting on with achieving your goals?