Not another video conferencing technology!
7th week of lockdown and we’re all using Teams and Zoom for our daily communications – it’s working well for most, however some are struggling a bit with Zoom fatigue too. We found a good article on it from the BBC and at the end of the blog how we can work towards alleviating it https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200421-why-zoom-video-chats-are-so-exhausting
We wanted to write about another Microsoft Office 365 technology we’ve embraced during lockdown to help support our staff and keep communications going during lockdown, we can hear you “not another conferencing technology” – we know what you’re saying, however bear with us…
Every morning we have a company wide Teams meeting, fairly well defined agenda and sticking to time– it’s great to see everyone’s faces and the work set out for the day ahead.
At the end of each day we review service – due to number of people and shift patterns it’s quite difficult to schedule everyone in to review what happened, celebrate successes, hints and tips (service and technical) and anything to plan for the next day. We were posting this as a written message in
to Teams, however it was taking too long produce and read. So naturally as video is the easiest way to consume information we started using Microsoft Stream.
Stream has been around for a couple of years and is included in most Office 365 plans. Stream could be compared to having your own YouTube, a way of recording and storing video either under a member of staff or create your own channels for different subjects.
Stream has its own mobile app to create video so gives you the ability to record when mobile without the need for fancy cameras or special equipment. Once the video has been posted to Stream we can share directly in to Teams so it’s all integrated and organised and easy for our staff to consume.
We’ve now gone a step further and started editing video using third party apps to introduce text and graphics to make the videos more swanky and fresh. We’re also now getting different members of staff to contribute and share ideas all focused on improving service where we can. We are not
presenters by any stretch, however we’re slowly warming to being on camera whilst learning new presentation skills.
We’re happy to share what we’re doing with Stream or explore any ideas you have if you think Stream might work for you, please get in touch.
