You may not like them, but they’re absolutely essential in today’s socially distanced world. Depending on how tech-savvy and social you are, you may be begging for the death of the online conference.
Don’t get your hopes up.
Online conferences are far from guaranteed to fade away after the coronavirus is subdued. They have a couple of advantages over the traditional in-person meeting, which may find them hanging on long after this is all blown over.
Read on to find out what advantages online conferences have that make them likely to stick around after the coronavirus.
They’re Quick and Easy
In-person conferences are a lot. You’ve got to block off time not only to go to the conference but also to get to where it’s being held and get back home or to your office.
Whether you’re discussing how to sell your merchandise, push your logoed bags, or otherwise promote your brand, you’ll want lots of time to do it. And in-person conferences take up a good chunk of that time.
The online meeting cuts out those transit times and lets employees transfer seamlessly between work and meetings.
The “It Could Have Been an Email” Paradigm
You’ve probably heard your employees complain about meetings and conferences. Most likely, they’ve said something like, “It could have been an email.”
When you’re trying to run a business, you want quick, effective strategies for developing an efficient workflow. You can’t promote logoed merchandise if you’re using all your time on useless conferences.
Online meetings are quick and (almost) painless and likely to improve company morale by respecting your employees’ valuable time. Like it or not, the online conference is just a good way to economise your time and get your message out without bugging your workers.
They Require Less Materials
In an online meeting, you can display information to many people in a seamless and efficient way that we just haven’t had before.
Think of it this way. You’ve got a graph for sales on your logoed merchandise and want everyone to be looking at the same place on it at the same time.
You could lower a projector, distribute paper versions of the graphs, and use a laser pointer to point out what you want your employees to see. Or, you could just share your screen. Which seems more efficient and less time-consuming?
You Can Attend Them No Matter What
You know the feeling- you’ve spent all this time looking at your employees’ schedules to block off a time for everyone, and when you finally get to the conference room- only one or two of them are there.
Frustrated, you check your email. What you get is a long list of excuses ranging from sick kids to sick adults to electricians’ appointments.
Sick, home-stuck, or waiting for an appointment, you can attend an online conference no matter what the circumstances. It’s much harder to come up with an excuse to duck out on a convenient online meeting than it is to skip an in-person conference.