01 – Memorable Meetings Introduction

Video Transcript: #

Welcome everyone on behalf of IT Solutions of South Florida. My name is Mike Gavigan and I welcome you to our session. This is the second part of our team series that we’ve put together for the Business Development Board Of Palm Beach County, and we’re very honored that they ask us to do this, and we’re pleased to tell you a little bit more about how to use Teams to create memorable meetings within your organization.

I.T. Solutions Of South Florida, we’re a network management company. That is all we do. People reach out to us for project work, we tell them no thank you and refer them to someone else. People that reach out to us and ask us to sell them some some equipment, and we say well it’s not really what we do.

But, we do projects, and we do sell equipment for the people whose networks we manage. That’s what we’re about, and we’ve been doing it for a long time. We’ve been serving Palm Beach County from our headquarters in Lake Worth for 16 years now. We’re concerned about your productivity. Technology is not something that is worth buying if you’re not able to use it to make your organization more efficient. That’s what Teams is all about that’s where focused on today.

Network resiliency, we don’t want you to be brought down because of a hurricane or because of a sprinkler head breaking off in your server room or a ransomware attack. So we want to make sure that you’re able to recover from these things rapidly without any loss of meaningful data.

And number three and just as important as recovering from that attack, is avoiding it the first place. So we combine leading edge technology with a fun and interactive and persistent program of employee education. It really makes our clients organizations more secure.

You’ll be recognizing some of these clients that we work with. Feeding South Florida is the fourth largest food bank and in the United States, they’ve been clients of ours for a long time.

Roger Dean Stadium, up in Jupiter is a long-term client of ours, we’re really proud to say that. US Polo Association, whether you go to the matches or whether you buy the shirts, we support them on both sides of that operation and Porsche We have a Porsche Racing in the US.

We roll some trucks out there and set up 30 servers or so and every bit of telemetry they get from their cars comes across our network and very proud of that, as we’re proud of all of these relationships.

Your Microsoft Teams team at I.T. Solutions.

So let’s kick this off, let’s start making this meeting a memorable one.

Teams is growing exponentially as we go across here. In the last four months they’ve experienced almost a thousand percent increase in the number of their users. Right now at the rate which is being used they’re about 2.9 million people in the US on a Team’s meeting at this very moment.

Okay, that’s extraordinary and that’s something that we’re going to we have to understand why. We have to ask why is it growing as fast as it is? I guess that’s the reason, Corona has obviously created a big spike in Teams use among people who are working distant from the office right now.

But I’d submit to you that there’s another reason why that’s happened. Here are other reasons.

Teams Increases Productivity #

This is a survey that was just released. It was conducted in 2019 and just released February 2020.

Even before social distancing began, executives who were using Teams, 19 out of 20 of them were saying Teams had increased the productivity of their organization.

We know that it reduces the cost of business travel, but there’s also I think it’s significant finding here the three-quarters of teams meetings, involved four fewer people. This is much more efficient than meeting in the office when we used to bring people in, and they would have to sit there for a hour meeting or half hour meeting, and they might only have three or four or five minutes that were relevant to them. Teams enables you to be much more surgical in the use of your staff bring them into the meeting and out of the meeting as you go.

We also found the project managers found teams made their time to completion much more efficient which I think is is very important if you want to bring something in on time and under budget. HR managers found Teams was reducing turn over in a fairly meaningful way.

So with all of those economic drivers, I think the the ubiquity of teams was going to happen anyway with or without Corona. Corona just sped it up.

That’s a screenshot from a meeting that we had here when we were planning our Teams meeting. It was good because we were able to have Lisa join us for a piece of the meeting, and she dropped off. Deena joined us for a part of the meeting, she dropped off. Being able to move people in and out as you need them is a fairly significant advantage here.

One of the things that happens in a group meeting when you’re sitting around the conference table is people come in who haven’t read the notes, who didn’t prepare, who missed the email with the agenda, who didn’t open the spreadsheet that’s gonna be discussed. This happens all the time and frequently what ends up happening is people submit hard copies of whatever was that was supposed to be looked at or if they’re not submitting hard copies they’re waiting around or explaining it they’re trying to put it up on a screen and present it.

Teams enables us to do this extraordinary efficiently, we can pull those documents right into the Team session, right into the meeting session and everybody can access them at once and everyone can look at them at once it’s extraordinarily efficient that way.

We’re gonna be handing off the screen between the presenters today and it’s fairly close to seamless and you’ll observe that it is not gonna be any fumbling with media. There’s not going to be any fumbling with going from one laptop to another. Much better than a live presentation and mobility is probably the biggest advantage here. We know people are working from any place at this moment in time and Teams makes it possible for them to be fully engaged and fully effective from any place on any device.

Teams Warnings #

There are some things to watch out for. You do not want to be that guy who goes walking into the kitchen while their spouse, or they’re significant other or their roommate is on, presenting the budget for the next fiscal year. Be careful about that.

You don’t want to be that guy who pushes out from the desk during a meeting, like this guy did on television where his wearing his box of shorts underneath his suit jacket.

You don’t want to be this person, this is actually a Zoom meeting. This picture went kind of viral, she got so caught up in the meeting, she carried the laptop into the bathroom with her and forgot that she was on camera…don’t be that person.

You have to be careful of the people in the background, don’t take advantage and start showing off. This particular woman works from home her husband works in the prop department at the local theater guild and frequently shows up behind her and kind of photo bombs her Zoom meetings with different outfits on. I like the Where Is Waldo one.

So you have to be prepared for how to use Teams and how to use it more effectively as we go.