Using Zoom for Work — A Primer On Typical Business Meetings using Zoom For Non Tech-Savvy Businesses

The precautionary Work-From-Home (WFH) measures in the wake of the COID-19 threat have forced many enterprises to adopt new platforms that support remote meetings / audio & video conferences / screen sharing and collaboration across distributed teams.

Zoom.us has been a darling of the tech world for many years given its simplicity, flexibility and freemium model. It is reporting extra-ordinary growth during these times (nearly 250k downloads daily) and therefore I decided to write this basic primer for using Zoom to conduct different types of online meetings. This is not comprehensive and I may have missed few use cases — my apologies if I did (please point out the same and I will update the article). My main purpose if to share some insights and experiences so non tech-savvy folks (businesses without an IT deptt or IT person) adopting Zoom for the first time can structure their meetings better.

1. You and the Boss / You and A Colleague: One-to-One meetings

If you want to speak to a co-worker regarding any office task or clarification or review something in detail (manager to employee review), a 1:1 meeting is a good choice.

If you only do 1:1 meetings, you can use the FREE version of Zoom, setup a meeting and share the link of the meeting with the colleague / partner you wish to speak to. You can do unlimited 1:1 meetings and they can be for any time (even 24 hours) so you can even leave Zoom running in the background and if the employee wants to talk to you, you can send a ping on WA/messenger/SMS and quickly switch to zoom window and conduct your business.

(Think of this as a presence management hack — the employee can see that you are at work, like looking into your cabin/desk to see if you are available, check ability to have a chat and join your meeting and discuss the work issue).

2. Team Discussions : You & Boss; And Many-to-Many Meetings

If you are doing only short meetings, of upto 40 minutes, you can still use the FREE plan from Zoom. Setup a meeting, share the link and upto 100 team members can join the meeting. Zoom automatically selects the window of the speaker, so the presenter / responder can be brought to focus automatically.

However, with a large meeting, there is plenty of cross-talk, people are not sure who should speak first and in what order and this can create some challenges. The time a set of people take to settle down into a meeting protocol and also the time when they join will mean that the business time for the meeting will get compressed. You will need capability to do meetings without the 40-minute time restriction. Also, the larger the organisation, the more number of team meetings will be required.

To get into an organised team meeting structure, you should consider purchasing the Zoom Pro — Plan. A Pro plan gives you unlimited meetings of unlimited time (technically 24 hour at a time) for upto 300 people (should be enough for most of us). But more importantly, it gives us a personal meeting ID that can be always available to everyone.

Think of a team of 8–12 people reporting to the manager and doing a stand up meeting in the morning or end of day summary meeting or weekly schedules status / review meeting or an emergency all hands meeting in the team or any other meeting that requires all to be present, to talk, raise issues, answer issues and record and share notes (anything more than 10 is bad for the manager and their ability to dedicate time to the team).

The manager can go-in for a Zoom Pro plan and get a meeting ID assigned to herself. Now she can create a meeting and keep it running thru the day. Every member on her team can join the meeting as needed (for a 1:1 session) or join the scheduled or emergency all-hands meeting with a single click.

For team meetings, the manager can assign speaking order, people can raise issues thru the common chat or raise their hands (thru icon) to ask a question or clarify a point. If needed, the manager can mute folks who are not speaking till the time they raise their hand to ask a question / clarification. The team can share their desktops, present their slides, record the meeting and circulate a record of the meeting to everybody. Works like a charm.

Many teams setup a remote meeting protocol to avoid cross chatter and ensure everyone is able to have their say and participate. A small template for effective meetings is shared at the end of this article.

Individual team members can have FREE basic plan or Pro plan depending on their need to host meetings of longer duration.

3. All-Hands / Town-Hall Meetings : A whole department or the entire company

If you need to organise an all-hands meeting across an entire deptt or a town-hall meeting for the entire company (upto 300 people) AND have multiple managers run 1:1 and team meetings, you can go in for Zoom Business Plan.

A Business Plan gives you 10 hosts and the ability to run meetings for upto 300 people (extra charges for higher number).

One can schedule meetings, integrate to calendars, choose own dial-ins and a host of reports that makes it possible for management to get a sense of what is happening across the business.

4. Webinar for Internal / External Stakeholders

If you are organising a webinar event for internal and external stakeholders, with multiple participants, presenters, attendees, recording, questions, chat, notes etc, one can go in for Zoom Pro / Zoom Business Plan with Zoom Webinar optional (Upto 100 presenters possible).

Try it. It’s very smooth.

5. Mini Conference with Breakout sessions

If you are organising a mini conference with keynotes, panel discussions, break-outs then Zoom Pro or Zoom Business with group collaboration features like break-out session / user assignments, white-boarding, mouse controls, shared annotations can be most useful.

As you have seen in the quick primer, Zoom is a great tool for all kinds of business meetings and collaboration across teams that are remote / working from home.

All it takes is the right plan, some experimentation and someone to help train/guide your teams to get the best out of the current situation. If you need further help, feel free to contact us at <info@racloop.com> and we will be happy to offer our assistance.