With mass home working video connectivity with your colleagues is going to be essential. Not just for maintaining business meetings, but for human connectivity and morale.
Video conferencing software allows multiple people to virtually connect and collaborate. Often involving video links, screen sharing, live instant messaging and live meeting note taking. Some organisations will have their own accounts already, so you just need to ensure that you have the access set up on your home computer.
If you don’t already have company-wide access to video conferencing, there are plenty of free options available to you. We’ve spoken to a Senior Audio Visual Design Consultant, who consults with large corporates, for his top five tools for staying connected.
1. Microsoft MS Teams
The top choice is the all-in-one software that combines video conferencing and existing Office 365 tools, so it syncs with your Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. It also incorporates file structures from Sharepoint and OneDrive, a native calendar service, group chat and many more third party plug-ins.
In fact, its tagline says it all, ‘Work remotely without feeling remote.’
You can sign up for free here
2. Zoom
Zoom is fast becoming a leader in the video communications industry, tackling group communications with their cloud platform for video, audio conferencing, collaboration, chat, and webinars.
It’s simple, easy to use and effective, and video conferencing is what it does best.
Sign up for free here
3. Cisco WebEx
This is the enterprise account that many large scale corporations still subscribe to. It features team collaboration and webinars as well as video conferencing.
Their small teams package starts from £11.25 per month.
For more information and downloads visit their website here
If you don’t need an all-singing, all-dancing video and collaboration tool, and you simply want to maintain face-to-face contact with your colleagues, the last two options below are great for group video calling.
4. Skype
Skype for Business is being phased out as its owner, Microsoft, rolls out MS Teams. But millions of people still use Skype for friendly face-time calls (300 million a month, to be precise).
Download it for free here
5. Google Hangouts
A bit like What’s App, you’ll find Google Hangouts more useful for… separating work groups from What’s App! As well as group chat you can hold video conferencing for up to 150 people, for free. And because it’s Google it’s easy to use. You just need a Gmail account to access it.
Access the web version here or download the app on to your phone.
Find out why face-to-face connections are so important when everyone is home working in our other articles here:
6 tips for onboarding a remote worker
How to win when working from home