Category: Productivity

Much of the world’s economy has been disrupted by the sudden outbreak of COVID-19. Following the World Health Organization’s declaration that the virus is a global health emergency, world governments introduced lockdown and social distancing measures that have changed the way people work. In the United States, tens of millions of people are already out of work, while others are changing the way they work and study by staying at home. 

Major organizations, universities, and even news organizations have completely transformed how they work and have proven that it’s possible to use mobile apps to collaborate with team members and keep projects moving. Even CNN, one of the largest news networks in the United States, is working from home! Network chief Jeff Zucker even recently announced that most staff won’t return to their New York officers until September.

Even in these difficult times, it’s possible to keep your business on track, communicate with your customers, collaborate with your team, and stay productive while working from home.

Videoconferencing Means You Don’t Need to Travel

Ever since lockdown measures were put in place in early spring, video conferencing apps have broken download records. In just one week in March, various video conferencing apps saw a record 62 million downloads, and that trend has continued. 

Google Meet, Skype, Zoom, and Houseparty are some of the most popular apps being used, and while some are squarely focused around helping friends reconnect, most are designed to make professional collaboration easy. Zoom has proven one of the most popular, allowing people to join a web conference in a browser or an app by clicking a link. Others, like Teams and Skype, require a specific app download and a free, registered account. 

Universities are delivering classes via Zoom, and professionals are connecting with clients and colleagues all over the world. With apps that are designed to reduce background noise, neat features that allow you to blur or even replace your background, meeting and discussing projects face-to-face from your home have never been this easy.

Secure Remote Desktop Solutions

While many companies already provide employees with work laptops that can be used at home, some business operations may rely on a secure intranet that protects company data. This is a major obstacle for companies that depend on members of their teams turning up to work and managing sensitive data on encrypted platforms. 

Thankfully, there are apps that solve this problem too. Former smartphone giant BlackBerry announced in March that they were making their BlackBerry Desktop software free for 60 days. The software allows users to connect to secure intranets and office computers using personal computers at home. It maintains encryptions, keeps data safe, and helps you work from home.

Team Management Apps

There’s a reason why working in an office is so good for productivity. It does more than an email or a phone call could ever do. By physically interacting with members of your team, discussing problems in real-time, and quickly solving problems, you ensure your business delivers the products and services your customers expect. It all boils down to time management, and while video conferencing helps with the human communication element, further apps are needed to ensure everyone in your business knows what to do at any point in time.

That’s where team management apps come in. There are lots of solutions out there, like the much-promoted Monday system, or the slightly more experienced Trello. Both of these apps, and the wealth of alternatives out there available on Mac, PC, iOS, and Android, allow people to communicate through live chat and oversee projects without leaving the browser.

Users can share files and calendars, complete digital to-do lists, and show other members of the team precisely what is happening at any given time. These apps aren’t just useful when working from home, either – they’re a useful tool for any office environment and they’re quickly proving that technology makes work more efficient wherever you are.

Customer Communication

Team management is important, but even when customers are at home they expect to hear from you. Whether you provide a service that requires minimal physical interaction with customers already, or if you’re a traditional store that has shifted to home deliveries, you must stay connected with your customers.

Various online tools allow you to do this, including social media management apps that make scheduling posts simple. Video apps like YouTube allow you to connect with your audience via live streams and recorded videos, updating them on exciting news and offers, or giving them a chance to interact with your brand in a way they’ve never done before. 

SMS tools offer an exciting opportunity to connect directly with customers, too. Text Magic is an SMS management tool that allows you to send messages directly to your customers’ pockets. Whether it’s an automated message about a great offer you think your customer is interested in or an update on an order, it’s one of the quickest and easiest ways of keeping in touch – and you can manage them easily online. 

Will Working Ever Be the Same Again?

The biggest hurdles that have stopped companies from allowing employees to work from home are being solved right before our eyes. Within a matter of weeks, most of the world has adjusted to a completely new lifestyle that involves staying at home and limiting travel to the bare necessities. 

This was unimaginable in a pre-COVID19 world, but businesses have shifted with great speed to keep operations running as smoothly as possible and much of that is down to the resourcefulness of app developers. The innovations are going to continue, too, as businesses embrace this brave new world of working from home. Telegram, a popular encrypted messaging app for Android and iOS, is already looking to add secure group video call features by the end of this year, catering for more than 400 million monthly active users.

This is a sign of things to come. It’s the new normal, but not something we should be scared of. Sure, we can’t go back to business as usual for some time, but in the meantime, we are changing the way we work for the better. Our teams are becoming more communicative despite being further apart, we’re learning to use technology to our advantage, and we’re streamlining our processes to ensure tasks are completed on time, every time.

We’re entering a brave new world of online cooperation and communication!

Taking conference calls from home surely isn’t new but it’s been on steroids as of late due to the ongoing pandemic. With most people forced to stay indoors, many have to adjust and get comfortable real fast performing tasks usually done from an office space and instead get it done from the comfort of their homes. In this blog post, we’ll be focusing on video conferencing calls and how you can make the experience seamless so you’re fully confident in doing it no matter where you are. 

Top video conferencing solutions

I figured this is the best spot to mention the background removal and replacement app that we’ve made called XSplit VCam. VCam functions as a virtual camera which essentially means it behaves like a physical webcam that you can select in other apps. 

To get started, open XSplit VCam and set up your desired background (or blur whatever your background is). Then go to whatever app or tool you’d like to use it on and select it as your web camera in place of your normal webcam, and voila! everything is now in place! Here’s a short video on how to use VCam with any of the apps and solutions we’re about to mention below.

You can download VCam at xsplit.com/vcam.

There’s a lot of apps that exist but we’ll just highlight the trusted ones which most of you are probably familiar with already. Please note this is not a comprehensive list nor a review as our goal is to simply list down the most commonly-used solutions today. There’s a lot of available resources out there that do comparisons but we find this one from PCMag to be the easiest to digest.

Google Hangouts/Meet

Arguably the most popular conference call solution for both small and medium businesses today, getting started with Hangouts is as simple as having a Google account which most of us have. If you’re into Google’s ecosystem already, it just makes so much sense to use this tool right away.

Skype

Back in the day, Skype was easily the most well-known conference calling solution thanks to its relatively intuitive and straightforward interface. Since then, there have been some roadblocks here and there but Microsoft has been constantly making improvements to the app by overhauling the user interface, adding features and making logical integrations. 

Zoom

Like Hangouts, Zoom is one of the most popular video conferencing solutions for businesses today. It has arguably also benefitted the most from the current pandemic as it’s seen a large bump-up in its total number of active users.

What sets Zoom apart from the rest of the competition is its extensive number of features that are simply just not available to other solutions in the market. 

GoToMeeting

GoToMeeting, while not as popular as other solutions mentioned above, is likewise a good option as it’s pretty capable in providing basic video conferencing needs. It’s not as feature-rich nor is the user interface as intuitive, but it’s reliable enough to get the job done.

Getting set up with any of the mentioned video conferencing solutions is about halfway through, perhaps even more. The other half is carrying out yourself well during the meeting, and we believe it can be achieved if you follow some simple but important tips that you’re about to read below.  

Video conferencing tips 

You can only become fully comfortable taking conference calls from home if you’re confident everything is correctly in place. So preparation is a big key here. A lot of the tips elaborated below are things that need to be done before the actual call. Remember, doing a call with your colleagues remotely is not really too different from a physical meeting so the basic principles apply. 

Familiarize yourself with the tools you’re using

We mentioned all the tools/solutions above, now it’s time to get used to them. They are very similar to each other in that you can mute/unmute your microphone, present your desktop, and so on and so forth, so it really boils down to how things are arranged and how their interface looks. 

Understand that you’ll likely use various functions of the tool that you’re using as the meeting progresses so familiarizing yourself with them goes a long way here. 

Make yourself presentable

I know working from home gives us a lot of flexibility that is simply not attained while working from our typical corporate environment. But it still works and there’s a line that needs to be tread so you can differentiate work from home. In this case, it’s you and how you look. 

Yes, XSplit VCam does the dirty work of prettying up your background so you don’t have to but the app doesn’t make yourself presentable. So go ahead, dress appropriately, make sure you look dap enough like you always strive to when working in an office space.

Have proper framing and lighting

This goes hand in hand with making yourself look presentable. While VCam’s detection is cutting edge, there’s still a big benefit in having good lighting and framing yourself properly. 

You should also make sure to re-calibrate when you make changes or if you’re not satisfied with the overall look. We’ve written more tips for making the most out of VCam here.

Arrive on time early

Well, the same applies to any standard meeting but it’s especially crucial for remote ones. Being at least 10 minutes early allows you to conduct the necessary checks and ensure everything is in place and set up correctly. How many times have we endured calls where the first 5 minutes is about asking participants if they can be heard clearly and vice versa?

Coming in early also saves you from panicking in case something happens. I have been in meetings where someone arrives late, seemingly have to run 500 meters, and is huffing and puffing trying to catch a breath. Not a good look and the same is true for online meetings.  

Mute yourself when not talking

Working from home means you likely have other people with you at home which makes it imperative to only let your microphone hear you when it’s your turn to talk. And even if you’re alone, your microphone is likely to easily pick up any background noise from a whirring fan beside you, to your neighbor’s dog barking, even a loud vehicle outside your apartment. These types of noise can distract your colleagues and disrupt the overall flow of your meeting. 

One quick tip is to make use of keyboard shortcuts that mutes/unmutes your microphone. Almost all video conferencing services mentioned above support that in one way or another. 

Stay engaged

Make sure your colleagues have your full attention and it’s reflected during the call. A very common thing people do is ‘multitask’ during calls but not only does this come across as rude, but it’s also distracting. Remember your webcam feed is being constantly shown for the entirety of the call so anything that’s not about you reading or listening will surely be more noticeable.

Again, it’s easy to relax and think you’re doing this in the comfort of your home but that doesn’t make the call or your meeting any different from how you’d otherwise do it from your office. So pay attention and stay focused all the time, the same way you’d like people to do for you when you’re talking. 

Parting Words

Even as someone who’s done conference calls remotely many times in the past, I can understand why it’s hard for people to just naturally get used to it. But with some practice, and applying the tips we mentioned above, getting comfortable and confident with the whole process is doable.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this matter. Do you have any other tips that you’d like to add to what was mentioned above? Or do you maybe disagree with some of what was mentioned? I’d like to hear it out so don’t hesitate to write in the comments section below. 

With more and more people working remotely or working from home, making a presentation that’s both informative and effective can be tough.

If you’re clicking around tabs on a browser, fiddling with desktop programs while trying to show your camera and the presentation during a Zoom call isn’t easy, or is it? If you couldn’t tell, right here is where I let you know “Hey, there’s an XSplit for that!”

Broadcaster to be exact. I’m going to tell you how you can spice up those online presentations with a little bit of XMagic (that’s XSplit’s patented magic, which makes a lot of assumptions about you considering broadcasting software magic. In our opinion, you should, but enough about magic, for now…)

Once you’ve downloaded and installed XSplit Broadcaster; click the application to open and you’ll be greeted with the starting screen. Click Presentation and you’ll see a bunch of ready-made scenes. Each scene is like an advanced slide for your presentation so go ahead and click around! It’s like we wanted to make this easy for you, huh? Nice big text with instructions, looking all easy and stuff! Well, it is! First things first, if you have made an already snazzy looking presentation on your computer using something like PowerPoint or online using one of Google’s many options or, ya know, other ones, (hey, I don’t know all the presentation software, I’m the XSplit guy, remember?) open it up! Now, back to XSplit.

Things will open on a scene that says Desktop Capture with Webcam. From here you should now see the window you had open, and XSplit giving you a pretty rad infinite loop effect. Don’t worry! If you minimize it, it’s gone! If you’re using two monitors you can also drag XSplit to the second monitor. To capture exclusively from the monitor your browser is on, right-click Desktop Capture and select which desktop you wish to pull from, but let’s just stick with what we have for now! You can also change the name in the frame around your webcam, just right click on Text in the Sources window and change it! We can also hide the introductory text by clicking the eye symbol next to it! See, I told you, magic! Real Magic!

Setting up your webcam is easy. Right-click, where it tells you to right-click to select your webcam and choose XSplit from the list of all the webcams connected and installed on your computer!

If you want to change the text under your webcam, right-click where it tells you to in the Sources Menu and type your text. This scene is great for when you still want to make eye contact with everyone in the presentation and add the element of intimacy you’d have giving the presentation in the room. Don’t want that? Well, head on over to our next scene which is just Desktop Capture.

This will work exactly the same but without the camera. People will still hear you and they will see whatever you see on your monitor. Speaking of hearing you, XSplit Broadcaster should have selected your default microphone but let’s double-check at the jump! Head to Tools, Settings, Audio and select the device you want XSplit to use for your Microphone.

There is also a scene labeled presenter camera. This is great when you’re addressing everyone without visuals and just want to talk. This is the same as you set up your webcam. Go ahead and right-click on things and make them work! There’s also a handy pre-presentation scene that you can have going when you first connect to your call. This is great if you want to have your microphone muted (click the little microphone symbol above the sources menu) and make sure you’re ready to go! Just be sure to click unmute when you begin the talk!

So, from here, you have one simple and slick-looking way to do your presentation set up and ready to go! You can use the presentation like normal: within the browser, as a full-screen camera, or picture in picture with XSplit Broadcaster handling everything!

To use this in a meeting using Google Hangouts, go to the settings and select XSplit Broadcaster as your camera.

For Skype, it’s exactly the same, head to settings and simply select XSplit Broadcaster as your camera! Make sure that you are using Skype for Desktop, not the pre-installed version that comes with Windows 10.

We hope this takes a lot of the stress out of giving your presentation when working remotely or from home. And this is merely the beginning, XSplit Broadcaster has a ton of features and functions that you can add – upping your production value and fun to your future presentations. We have a bunch of tutorials for just that! Want something like this in your next presentation?

XSplit Broadcaster can do that! Good luck and be sure to check around the website for more things you can do with XSplit Broadcaster!