Staying Connected in the Age of Covid - 19

One of the challenges exposed and experienced by people working from home and remotely during the pandemic, is communication - and more specifically keeping in touch with your team members. Although in this day and age, emails are virtually ubiquitous, it’s often not a substitute for face to face conversations. As many of you have probably already witnessed, the pandemic and quarantine has caused the use of remote conferencing applications like zoom, google meet, and teams to explode across multiple sectors, compensating for the lack of immediacy emails provide. That being said, while all of them can fill the need of essential tools during this time, each of them come with their own benefits and drawbacks that need to be considered depending on the style of work you’re doing.

Zoom, being one of the most popular, offers a robust option for creating meetings and integrates quite nicely with one of the remote bluetooth Yamaha speakers my office has, so my calls come in clearly and vividly. That being said, anything that works well with a plug-and-play speaker, and makes my life easier, is hard not to love. Unfortunately, as many of you are aware, it’s not uncommon for people to have encountered unwelcome guests dropping in on meetings, and at times engaging in inappropriate behaviors. Although future patches have all but eliminated these occurrences, security is always an issue, and it’s hard to have confidence in a software following problems like that. In addition to that, I like it’s ability to assign a moderator, and to put restrictions on sharing, photos, and the other actions; it’s a great way to have some level of control in the meetings, and to keep people on task when need be.

Coming up next we have Google Meet. Generally, I’m a lover of all things Google, and whenever I use their software, it’s easy to remember why. The interface is clear, clean, and works seamlessly with google calendar’s scheduling capabilities, which is beyond useful, especially when trying to keep track of the myriad of meetings one is bound to encounter throughout the day. Depending on the day, we use google meet- especially when interacting with clients, as it’s free, accessible and easy to use for basic meetings.

Lastly, and as my favorite option, we have Microsoft Teams. Not only does it offer a wide variety of ways to connect with your team - whether its by video chat, phonecall, or text - but there are also a wide number of ways to organize your conversations for easy retrieval. In addition to that, the wiki features on each channel allows you to write guides for topics discussed in meetings, while making it simple to organize and keep track of.

While we’ve used a variety of softwares throughout the numerous projects and clients we worked for, it’s often been necessary to explore and challenge oneself as much as possible to find the options that will work best for your team, and our team at Amplifyy is committed to staying at the forefront of technology in order to keep our workflow optimized and clients happy.

To find out more about what Amplifyy can do for your online business, reach out to our team at amplifyy.com and schedule a consultation, where we can assemble a custom plan for supercharging your brand.