Keeping Staff Informed through Quarterly Meetings, Emails and Conference Calls

Most businesses take a look at their progress in each quarter; this is a useful time to examine how the company has fared during the past few months. It provides the opportunity to set goals and address any unexpected problems. Traditionally, this is done by organizing the appropriate department heads and other relevant staff in a central location.

Conference Calls Made Easy

In the modern world of business, it can be quite costly to bring staff in for general meetings. With branches often located on several different continents, the inconvenience and impact on the schedules for each outlet can often be more troublesome than the value of the meeting in question.

Fortunately, there is a cost-friendly solution that eliminates these drawbacks and provides an easy way to pass along the information necessary for your company to maximize profit and make the best use of employee time and resources.

A valuable resource for this purpose is freeconference.com, which can be used from any telephone and can connect with parties anywhere in the world for free. This is done using a local number and a provided access code.

Unlike Skype, with FreeConference.com an internet connection is not needed and there is no limit on the number of callers that may participate. Calls may be recorded and while there is a six hour maximum duration per session, the number of calls in a day is unlimited.

Good Old Fashioned e-mail Should Not Be Discounted

 While conference calls are a great way to receive instant input or feedback regarding new developments or goals within the company, e-mail does have a visual advantage. If there are charts or sales graphs each participant needs to view in order for the information to be fully imparted, e-mail is still an excellent distribution option.

Key Points to Remember

•         When choosing the method for which your information will be presented, be sure to choose a format which will display in the same manner for each participant. If not all divisions of your firm are using the same incarnation of Microsoft Word, formatting of both text and graphics may become messy and difficult to decipher. At worst, they can be rendered incomprehensible. If you are not sure of compatibility across all divisions, you can choose to save Word documents as pdf files. While there are basic and professional versions of Adobe Acrobat, documents will display the same way in each.

•         Microsoft PowerPoint is a standard form of presentation for businesses large and small, delivering information in a format that clearly gets across data and goals and, with the appropriate amount of care, does so in a manner that is pleasing to the senses. When used in coordination with a provider like FreeConference.com, staff can progress from one slide to the next in tandem, thus providing a very good recreation of an actual in-person meeting. One point to remember is the size of the file. A PowerPoint that is heavy on graphics and/or sound can require larger files that might tax the limitations of an e-mail server. This is less likely to be an issue with a company server, but might cause delivery issues for an employee logging in from home or a Wi-Fi site with a weak signal.

While in-person interaction is often the best way to do business, it is not always cost effective. The above methods provide excellent means for companies to combat any inefficiency and cost that may arise when seeking to chart their progress each quarter.

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