If you’re tired of walking out of a meeting feeling puzzled as to why you were even there, you’re not alone. According to research, US businesses waste close to $40 billion in wages paid for time spent in pointless meetings each year. For context, that’s more than the GDP of quite a few countries.

While regular meetings are critical to keeping everyone in an organization on the same page, they can often do more harm than good when not run properly. There are many causes for ineffective, time-wasting meetings, and your company is likely guilty of at least a few of them.

Here at AVer, we take pride in providing video conferencing tools that make meetings more productive. Let’s take a close look at how our technology solves several common meeting efficiency problems.

Failure to Prep the Room

Problem: Overlooking room prep is a big mistake. The air conditioner needs to be started, seats arranged appropriately, projectors turned on, and, if you’ve got remote participants, the conferencing camera set up. No one wants to sit there and wait while you awkwardly fumble with the remote, manually adjusting the camera to fit everyone in frame.

Solution: Planning ahead to move chairs and cool down the room is simple. Thanks to AVer SmartFrame technology, getting your conferencing camera ready is just as easy. SmartFrame uses facial recognition algorithms to automatically adjust the camera's field of view, making sure everyone is included in the meeting. All it takes is the push of a button, so no meeting time is wasted. The USB plug-and-play AVer CAM540 and VB342+ are examples of conferencing cameras that feature SmartFrame convenience.

Don’t Start on Time

Problem: When your meeting starts late—whether it’s because a key participant is missing or the remote site is taking forever to log in—everyone loses. All those in attendance lose valuable time, and the company is generally less productive.

Solution: While we can’t show up at your office and physically drag people into your huddle room on time, we can offer smooth starts to the remote collaboration side of the situation, especially if you implement one of our on-premise systems. Our EVC170, SVC100, and SVC500 conferencing systems offer extremely convenient connectivity via WebRTC and EZMeetup so that remote participants can simply click a WebRTC URL or key in a Meeting ID to instantly join a meeting. If you still have problems getting everyone to show up on time with these solutions, then maybe it’s time to get out the pink slips.

Don’t Have the Right People in the Room

Problem: Another common gripe that meeting participants often have is that people who should be in the room are conspicuously absent. Your brainstorming session will be quickly derailed if you have to track down a project manager or if a technician isn’t present to shoot down truly impractical ideas and keep the discussion on the right path.

Solution: It’s not always possible to have all relevant parties in a room for a meeting—sometimes key employees are away on business or someone forgot to invite them. To fix this, you can use AVer’s multipoint or endpoint conference cameras in conjunction with our VCAssist and EZMeetup software to access the correct human resources. VCAssist syncs with user calendars across all their connected devices to enable quick and hard-to-miss scheduling. EZMeetup lets your team members join the meeting by phone or tablet from wherever they are.

Distractions

Problem: Disruptions to your meeting may only take a second to occur, but they can throw your session completely off the rails. Such interruptions can come from anywhere, including the manual adjustment of a camera to accommodate late arrivals on-screen or focus on a new presenter.

Solution: We’ve solved this problem with our new SmartSpeaker function, which can automatically zoom in on whoever is talking, switching when the speaker changes. This eliminates the yawning and eye-rolling that's inevitably triggered when the camera operator clumsily pans, tilts, and zooms, or when the participants play a quick game of musical chairs to get the next presenter in frame.

Not Enough Visuals

Problem: Holding a meeting about facts and figures is almost pointless without accompanying visuals. Even if the participants are eagerly attentive and taking notes, there’s a significant chance that critical information will be lost when there are no relevant graphs and charts.

Solution: The AVer SVC500 makes sharing a presentation a natural part of your meeting. Connect a laptop via HDMI or DVI, and use the wireless ScreenShare feature to grab content from a device that’s beyond the reach of wired options. EZMeetup allows remote participants to benefit from the full visual experience as well, even sharing content from their tablets or phones, and using the EZDraw app to contribute live annotations. This way, you can make sure everyone in the meeting fully understands the topics presented.