Many of us are working at home these days, and we have to have business meetings. Video conferencing and remote collaboration rely on how well you look and sound online. Here are a number of items that, based on my experience, have helped me and hopefully that will help you as well.
Tips and Checklist for Video Conferencing at Home
Video Conferencing Checklist
Setting: Set up for the video meeting
Pay attention to the background behind you
Clutter backgrounds may be distracting to other attendees in the meeting
Solid color walls are the best background
Other people in the background can be distracting
Check out background options inside your web conference software
Green screens work very well
How you look
Avoid stripes or busy patterns
Avoid green if you are using a green screen
Check your sound and background noise - poor quality sound can be annoying
Eliminate any echoes, static, or room noise
Position your mic close to you
Headset mic is best, position about a finger width away from the side of your mouth
Bluetooth headsets are less reliable than wired ones
Laptop mics pick up more room noise
Worry about the lighting - bright lights or windows behind you can often deter the camera's abilities to see you
Flat, even light is best
Provide enough light in front and above
Use a lamp behind your computer if necessary
Check your camera
High resolution is preferred
New webcams are quite good
Camera should be near the screen
Connectivity in the home
Try to get on Ethernet if you can
If Wi-Fi is slow, switch to hot spot
Products I have used – see comments section
Additional Resources
Directional Microphone with stand, battery, and micro sd card
Basic Non-directional USB Mic
Video Conferencing from Home
Edited video transcript:
This is a video about the do's and don'ts of video conferencing at home. Many of us are working at home these days, and we have to have business meetings. There are some things that I haven’t been doing appropriately, and hopefully my solutions might help you as well.
Business meetings are going to be more and more necessary. We may not be back at work as soon as we would wish, and therefore the image we share with the world is on video conferencing.
It’s important to consider what's behind you. A solid wall works great. If your background is cluttered with shelves, books, and other disorganized things, that becomes distracting to the other attendees in the meeting. If the background is as simple and clear as possible the focus will be on you as a meeting attendee. If the background has bright lights or windows, the video camera will read that light and adjust the exposure to compensate, making the foreground too dark.
There are many ways to create a solid color background. You could hang up a sheet, or you can do a green screen. I tried this recently and it works really well. Many web applications have background options. I've used BlueJeans, Zoom, Teams, and GoToMeeting. Zoom has an interesting background option you can click on, but it only works well with a fairly solid color background or a green screen. Without that funny aberrations appear on the edges of your hair or skin that are distracting. Some background blurring programs work well. Teams has one that I like.
How you look is also important. Recently, I happened to wear a very busy patterned shirt for a video conference, and it turned out that these video systems don't like busy patterns. I try to wear solid colors and try to avoid green. If you use a green screen and wear something green, that area will behave the same way as the background. The same thing happens if you’re wearing something blue in front of a blue screen. If your clothing becomes completely or partially invisible, that's annoying and distracting for viewers.
One of my challenges is that my son sometimes is working from home at the same time, and we are sharing an office. For a while you could see him in the background working on his project work while I was in a professional meeting with a group of business associates. They didn't seem to care, but it could possibly have been annoying. To solve this problem, we placed a green screen between us and that worked pretty well. We also turned the camera a little bit so that he was out of frame. I really had to think about what the viewers saw.
It might be helpful to have a special place for video meetings already set up appropriately with a screen or sheet on the wall and good lighting. That way you can just sit down, have your meeting, take your notes, and then go back to another spot for your day to day work. Setting up a special place just for your meetings can be really helpful.
How you sound is also important. It turns out that these computer systems have mics in them, and webcams have mics in them, and headsets have mics in them, so you could be using a mic that you don't know you're using. I have had this problem a number of times. You can flip between mics but they are not always reliable. The best way is to pick a mic that is close to you. If you happen to use a headset with a mic, it’s a good idea not to put it directly in front of your mouth, and maybe one or two centimeters away. I believe this is the proper placement of the mic to prevent popping or hissing sounds which can be irritating to those in the meeting.
I've found that many laptops have pretty good microphones, but if they aren't close to you, they don't work very well. They also tend to pick up room noise and the sounds of people talking or scuffling in the background. I like to use mics that are close and/or directional. Here's an example right here, I'm using a directional mic today, and you can also hook these up directly to your laptop with a cable, and then they become part of your meeting microphone. When you plug in these mics, you'll have to change your settings to the microphone of interest. It might take a little fishing and it can vary on different computers. On my PC the settings are in the lower right corner.
Many people like to use Bluetooth headsets, and I try not to use those because the batteries can run out. Also, if you’re using your phone, sometimes you can have a signal fade if you’re not close enough. Bluetooth can also lag behind your speech, which can also be annoying. Video will be presented with a different cadence than your audio, which can be confusing. The other challenge with lag is that the other meeting members think it's open time for them to speak, and you haven't started, or you started right on top of them. Usually they think you've finished, but you really haven't and you really have to slow down the cadence of the meeting when that occurs. I like to avoid the Bluetooth solutions for meetings.
Connectivity in the home can often be challenging, especially if you have family members working near you or with you on their own jobs, because we're all staying at home and you might be sharing bandwidth. In my case, I've had as many as four meetings going simultaneously in my house, and I can lose connectivity or video rates fade and become jumpy or stop completely. You might consider switching to your phone as a hotspot because it's on a different network. I sometimes hook my laptop to ethernet to avoid the wireless fade that can occur with the router in the home if others are using it at the same time.
In the comments field below, I listed a bunch of the products that I like to use. There are many others out there that are quite functional and professional. We have also created a blog posting of a checklist, and it turns out this was a bit overwhelming for me in the beginning, because there's so many things to think about. I like checklists. When I set up for a meeting, I look at the various aspects of the setting: What's behind me? What is the lighting like? How do things appear to those who are in the meeting?
I hope this is helpful, and would like to hear your ideas on how to do business video conferencing at home. Please post them in the comments below. Thank you.
