Sharing Content Over the Cloud

Critical communications issues in the workplace need to be addressed promptly before they become endemic and acculturated. While well-run meetings can enhance communications and camaraderie between teams and departments, overloading the schedule with meetings that are unproductive, repetitive, and uninformative will sow the seeds of a disengaged and stressed out staff. Making meetings effective, especially when trying to pull together freelancers, out of area personnel, and in-house staff members can make running an effective meeting where everyone had input and derives needed information a challenge.

Cloudy with a Chance of Engagement

Conveying content for a meeting can take different forms, but one of the most effective is video. Think about YouTube, the heavy hitter in the video industry, and the huge pool of content creators and consumers who use the internet for watching a classic Richard Feynman lecture to watching the latest cat videos. Bringing video content to you meetings isn’t difficult if you have a cloud-based video conferencing system like – for instance – BlueJeans that puts you in place to share videos via the cloud over the video conferencing network via Blue Jeans Video Sharing. Hosting content in the cloud is more secure and a faster means of sharing the meat and potatoes of meetings – information. Video content should stream smoothly, without pixelation and lagging sound; problems that can plague older, hardware based systems.

Getting the most out of your meetings, no matter where your attendees are, depends on creating an environment where cross communication and information sharing can thrive. Let’s face it, we’ve all been in meetings that musk like an animal caught in a trap, we’d chew off out own body parts to escape. Keeping staff engaged is a vital point of management, especially since it’s the experienced, educated workers who reported the most disengagement with work in response to a Gallup Poll on employee well-being. Providing a positive atmosphere, rich in information and input can bring back that wandering attention span, or wake them up better than a latte with three shots of espresso.

Easy-Peasy

The use of cloud storage for sharing or backing up data is not new to most of Generation X, the Millennials, or Digital Generation denizens. They’ve been using it for some time to stream music and movies, upload videos and podcasts, and share media with their friends. Creating a presentation, brief, video, or other media and sharing it is nothing to be intimidated by. In fact, it might be harder to create the content than it is to share it. Cloud offers several distinct advantages based on its architecture.

Data in the cloud is stored on multiple remote servers instead of on a local hard drive. When you access the storage via your internet connection, such as streaming a movie or work with Dreamweaver in Adobe Creative Cloud, or posting your own content to a blog or to YouTube, you are already using the cloud in a public way. These server networks take your content, and then distribute it across a number of other servers. When someone asks to see that particular content, they are directed to a server that has the content, one with less traffic, and a better loading time. This means that the content is presented quickly and efficiently without the distraction of a “run” on an in-house server or using an outside app to store and deliver the content.

Effective Meetings are Good Business

According to a Verizon study, people love meetings! Over 90 percent of attendees see meetings as an opportunity to contribute, be involved, and be heard. Meetings give staff valuable face time, and in a study conducted by Gigaom, almost 90 percent of videoconferencing users reported feeling more connected and involved in their projects afterward. Well-run meetings might even contribute toward job satisfaction. What works against meetings is stress, with concerns about other work piling up while preparing for, attending, and implementing the meetings directives. Likewise, overloading staff with ineffective meetings can increase stress and disengagement, so nobody should be able to call meetings that cover matters that could otherwise be handled by a mass email, phone call, or even a quick chat in the break room. Everyone’s time is valuable, especially when working on complex projects, so save the meetings for when they are really needed.

Start by looking at all the meetings scheduled for the next month, then start asking why the meeting is needed, when it will start, when it will end, and require an agenda to be presented and approved before scheduling. For instance, a thirty minute meeting to cover updates on a given project could be handled by an email blast, while a small, short meeting with the core team could be scheduled instead of a staff-wide meeting. Use your best judgment and watch everyone’s performance and morale improve. In the meantime, take a look at some of the cloud predictions for 2015.

Andre Smith is an Internet, Marketing and E-Commerce specialist with several years of experience in the industry. He has watched as the world of online business has grown and adapted to new technologies, and he has made it his mission to help keep businesses informed and up to date.