9 Ways To Handle Conference Calls
Albert Klingenberg, Account Manager, Levi9
Remote communication. Right now it’s even more fashionable than TikTok
But it never stops feeling a bit… well… weird. How so? Lots of reasons: frequent tech issues, no sound, out of sync video, unintentional interruptions – those kinds of things.
But let’s be honest – all of this is out of our control. Trouble is, the more people you add into a ‘mass call’ of sorts, the more likely things are to go wrong.
So why is it that we recently had a conference call with over 30 people and everything went according to plan? The call was a kickoff session with a big Dutch telecoms company. We’ve just landed them as a customer and are now one of their preferred suppliers (humblebrag…).
In short, given the high stakes, we couldn’t afford to mess this up. And we didn’t. We just put some ground rules in place: 9 ground rules, in fact.
And we’d like to share them with you right here.
Tips For Success
1) Have A Plan – Make sure everyone understands why you are meeting and what the goals and outcomes should be. Once the call is complete and follow-up actions have been agreed, confirm these by email as quickly as possible.
2) Be On Time – If the meeting is supposed to start at 9 am then make sure it does! Setting this is stone for all your meetings will ensure the meeting remains on schedule.
3) Assign Moderators – Make key members of your team the main conference call moderators. They’ll make sure your meeting stays on track.
4) Ban Tourists – Anyone who wants to be on the call is welcome. But what about those who don’t? Those who aren’t keen to engage, contribute ideas, or express vehement disapproval? As meeting chair you need to know who’s on the call and why. So make it your business to find out.
5) Listen Quietly – Tech tip! Make sure anyone who isn’t speaking is on mute. This will improve audio quality for everyone and make interaction clear and concise. Plus you won’t be subjected to dogs barking/weeping children.
6) Encourage Dialogue – The worst conference calls are those where one person talks endless about something. True understanding comes from interaction. So while it’s courtesy to keep quiet when someone’s chatting, no one should be afraid of raising their hand.
7) Question Time – As per above, you can’t have constant interruptions or questions during a 5 person+ call. You need to make it clear that attendees should signal to one of the moderators if they have a burning question. It might be that they hold off until the end or arrange a separate call to address a specific point.
8) Take Responsibility – Make sure either your moderators or team leads or whoever’s on the customer relationship frontline, are ready and willing to answer questions. They don’t need to have all of the answers, just the confidence to say they don’t know and that they’ll go away and find out the answers, as an action, before the next meeting.
9) Clarify Next Steps – Decisions were made, accords agreed, and next steps were confirmed… weren’t they? Sure they were – you know exactly what you’re doing!
Sounds simple, right? It is!
Put these ideas into practice and we’re certain you’ll see great results in your meetings, and this will benefit your teams and your customers respectively.
We believe when we come out of the COVID19 situation the culture of remote working is going to evolve further and emphasis on quality remote interactions will grow – so make sure you and your team have got your conference call processes aligned.
Arrange time for yourself, because otherwise you can’t keep it up
Our CEO, Pien Oosterman, was interviewed by Kristien Janssen – Kaldewaij from Odgers Berndtson about her leadership challenges during the pandemic.
What an IT Services CEO has learned about working from home during COVID-19.
In our fifth interview with a CEO at home, we talk to Pien Oosterman, CEO of IT Services Provider Levi9 Technology Services, about her leadership challenges during the pandemic.
What does your work situation look like during this pandemic?
I am in my husband’s loft. It is a terrible loft, to be honest. I started downstairs and after three days, I thought ‘I’m going to kill someone’. I was in the middle of a call and then my family would play the piano or make coffee. We really had such a fight after three days. Then my husband said “well, then sit in my room”, so here I am now.
What type of insights has this COVID-19 situation given you?
The eye-opener of the year is that remote working is much better than we could have ever expected. Both for business and education.
There was still quite a lot of criticism about it, as in ‘is this the way to do it’? But we actually see that many people are more productive. And we also see that half of them really miss the social element of work. All in all, the business keeps going very well.
What do you like and what do you find difficult about the disruption caused by this pandemic?
I travel a lot, so I spend about half the time in the countries where we have our people: Serbia, Romania and Ukraine. There I have a lot of meetings with groups of employees. It allows me to read between the lines and to understand what is going on on the floor. I miss that interaction.
So I have to say, I miss the contact with my colleagues.
What advice would you give other CEOs facing the COVID-19 leadership challenge?
The first week I had such long days with calls, that I had a headache at the end of the day.
I just couldn’t anymore, it was too much. Now, I clear my schedule from 12 to 1, which I never do, and take the time to eat. Or I’ll be hula hooping for an hour, but of course you can also just walk around the block. I try to join dinner at half-past six and stop working after that. I noticed that the burnout level increases very quickly because the intensity of calls is heavier.
A lot of my time is spent on communication and coordination.
I think thoroughly about what we send from our headquarters to our colleagues – what is the tone of voice and what do they need at what time. Do they need me or is it something else? When you look at how productive I am, you might wonder. Sometimes it costs me three days to produce one video or email. I find it very important to pay attention to finding the right tone of voice.
We have a fairly homogeneous group of people, all highly educated. In that sense, communication is easy, but what makes it difficult is the big cultural differences compared to The Netherlands.
These differences are ‘so-so’ compared to each-other, but compared to the Netherlands very different. Solidarity has a different meaning in those countries than it does for us.
We are quite individualistic. There, community is much more important.
I need to keep paying attention to that cultural difference because the risk of miscommunication is always there.
27 May - Staying connected & secure when working from home
May 27th 2020
Staying connected & secure when working from home
These are new times with new challenges for all of us. And while many businesses struggle to stay in business, others are reinventing themselves to keep delivering services to their customers. For many of us, business continuity has been a theoretical exercise: creating plans for unlikely events. This time, it is for real.
Working from home is not new for Levi9, we had both the technology and the mentality in place. Still, we faced additional challenges when ensuring that 1100 people across Europe could work from home, both securely and effectively. Being an Agile company at heart, we have overcome these challenges quickly and without impact on delivering to our customers worldwide.
When faced with the requirements of social distancing, and as consequence having to work from home, we are all quickly picking up on this new way of working. Digital lunches with the team and Friday drinks, working with your child on your lap and with your cat on your keyboard is not something we were accustomed to on a daily basis before.
At the same time, when faced with fears for our loved ones, we are ready to compromise on what we took for granted before, like socializing with our friends and colleagues. However, there are some things we cannot compromise on, even under these circumstances. Digital security is certainly one of those things, and now it is even more important than ever.
We feel that in these times, it is important that we share and learn from each other. What troubles did you come along and what creative solutions did you come up with? Do you still have questions and concerns and would you like to know how other digital and software companies moved to the new normal? What do you think is waiting on the horizon and how do you expect you will be organized -say- half a year from now?
We want to share our experiences with you and give you the opportunity to share your creative solutions, concerns and questions with us and with other Levi9 customers. We would like to invite you for an Online Round Table session to share with you our story on how we did it and to invite you for a discussion about this topic.
Everything You Always Wanted To Know About DevOps (But Were Afraid To Ask)
Codrin Baleanu, Solutions Architect, Levi9
Everyone wants to increase business efficiency, right? But for that you need a decent DevOps team. But what is DevOps and how can it improve your business? How do you get started? Let’s dive in…
What is DevOps?
In simple terms, as a job, DevOps is the combination of a software developer and a traditional operations role. Why? Because to be successful in a cloud environment, you must understand both. The two go together, like bread and butter.
Having better cooperation between developers and operations streamlines complexities, giving you a full overview and control over deployments, costs, and resources from a single portal.
This enables faster turnaround and allows you to implement new ideas and products at a much lower cost and faster speed.
A Culture Of Efficiency
Implementing DevOps unleashes an entirely new way of getting feedback, which shapes the way you approach problems. Instead of waiting months for feedback, you see finished products and results in days or weeks.
A lot of this is possible because of the cloud. If your business is looking to stay relevant in the market, save money, and develop performance resilient products, a cloud-based solution is, in my experience, the ultimate choice.
It’s always nice to see companies adopting DevOps and the cloud to solve their problems. When I started with the AWS cloud, it was tough. But once I got the hang of it, I felt empowered to try and build more effectively. I now spend a lot of my time helping developers and customers understand the DevOps way of seeing things – through presentations, training, and workshops.
Putting It Into Practice
When we implement DevOps with you, getting a good understanding of your current data flows and system resources is critical from the start. To improve your current situation, we need to see what’s already built and understand how your current solution works together. If we’re building everything from scratch with you, that’s even better. First, we need to fully understand your business driver’s key metrics – where your business is at, and where you want to go. We then need to learn what a successful outcome looks like – for both your users and stakeholders – to ensure you reach your business goals.
Discovery and Beyond
Once we fully understand your data structure, business metrics, and goals, we deep-dive into the layers of your solution. We’ll ask you further questions to tailor and modify this foundational structure to present you with the tentative solution and discuss the pros and cons.
It’s a discovery phase, learning what you need to do and what we need to do to craft the solution to your business problems.
Shaping a highly effective DevOps solution takes time. Some projects of mine have lasted a few months, while others took several years. It’s all about creating a practical solution to fit the size of your company – to balance speed, complexity, and cost. A small company with smaller budgets operates very differently to larger ones.
Ultimately, software needs an objective. It needs to work in step with an organisation’s ambitions. Getting the balance right, and making sure everything fits together in the right way is where DevOps shines.
Top 5 quarantine picks by our colleague Sonja Ivković
Sonja Ivković – Learning & Development Partner “My 5“
(Top 5 quarantine picks)
Interview done by Netokracija.
The content from digital culture that she follows the most, this week was revealed to us by Sonja Ivković, Learning & Development Partner in the company Levi9.
Sonja is the mother of two girls, holds a PhD in psychological sciences and has a lot of experience in almost all areas of HR. She stayed in the employee development field for the longest time, because Sonja believes that development, both personal and professional, is the only successful strategy for a fulfilled life.
When she retires, she says, she would like to live by the sea and ride a white Vespa.
Series: ‘Gomorra’ as an image of the Italian mafia
I’m frantically watching the series called “Gomorra”, a rather tense and somber series about cruel Neapolitan mafia that doesn’t pick resources when it comes to struggle for supremacy. Nothing is sacred and unlike to the common belief of the Italian mafia seen as “gentlemen in expensive suits”, there is not much glamour and luxury in Gomorra.
The series, at first, attracted me because it is a European production, I also expected to learn a bit of Italian along the way, but it turned out that it is filmed in Neapolitan dialect, so in Italy itself, the series is broadcasting with the title. It is too late to give up now, but the colorful depiction of brutal violence is not always enjoyable.
YouTube: The mastery of bread baking
My husband has been in the hobby of homemade bread for a while. Yes, lucky me, and to be transparent immediately, I don’t take credit – I just do the dishes and take photos for Instagram. For this reason, lately we have been following channels that deal with the topic of bread making, like this one. Now we went a step further – we also grow homemade yeast and bake bread from ingredients that ferment for 60 hours.
Book: How to successfully lead IT teams
I just finished the book Elastic Leadership written by Roy Osherove. It is a practical guide for day-to-day (IT) team management, based on the author’s professional experience as a team lead. The book is written in a simple language, with many practical examples that author also collected from colleagues from similar occupational background.
There are not many theoretical perspectives (in my opinion – this is both an advantage and a disadvantage) and the book offers experiential advice when addressing common challenges in life of each team. The sentence I remembered was: „If you don’t know anything about human behavior, you know very little about software development”. I recommend it, for sure.
Music: Radio instead of playlist
I listen to Monte Carlo radio. Super cool music!
Text: What about happiness in the work environment?
I recommend the great article on the topic of happiness in the workplace in Harvard Business Review. It is seriously supported by relevant research in this field. This comprehensive text has inspired me to take a more detailed and critical interest in this buzz phenomenon and served as an inspiration to embark on the writings of my own on this topic (stay tuned).