Video conferencing and screen sharing

This article is part of a series discussing How to stay in touch (and stay productive) whilst you're working remotely.

Keeping in touch is hard when working with a distributed team. Personally, I much prefer working in an office where you can chat to each other and collaborate on work much easier. I’m all for togetherness.

That being said, I do see the merits in remote working such as:

• no commuting, which is good for the environment,
• not wasting time commuting, which is good for work/life balance,
• the flexibility it brings to your day, which again, is good for work/life balance.

Video Conferencing

We’ve tried a few different tools to keep in touch such as Slack, Zoom and Google Meet. My preference is Google Meet. Google Meet allows you to video call with multiple participants and also share your screen. Screen sharing allows your client or co-worker to see your screen or vice-versa. This makes it handy for delivering presentations or troubleshooting issues remotely.

Another boon for me with Google Meet is that it seems to work with my patchy wifi and doesn’t require any software downloads. This makes it ideal for sharing with clients and co-workers who may not be able to install extra software to video call. If they’ve got Google Chrome and a webcam, chances are, they’ll already have everything they need in order to get going.

Captions

You can also turn on captions whilst in a meeting, too. This will subtitle whoever is speaking in the meeting which may make it easier to follow when you’ve got patched sound. Whilst I wouldn’t rely on this, it does seem to work rather well but may struggle with accents. You’ll probably spend half the meeting trying to get it to slip up however which can be hilarious.

It’s available as part of Google’s G Suite package.