One of the best ways for employees to communicate with each other is through personal interactions. Unfortunately, time spent in meetings is time that’s not used to generate revenue or create new business ideas.
It’s not necessarily the time spent during the meeting that creates inefficiency. It is the time employees spend organizing, traveling to, and waiting for in-person meetings. This is where conference calls can be beneficial.
What Is a Conference Call?
A conference call is a phone call that has three or more people. Conference calls make it possible for people in different geographic locations to meet together at a predetermined time via phone or VoIP to discuss urgent business where the input of multiple individuals is needed. Conference calls are key to the success of many businesses since it makes communication easier.
How Poor Conference Calls Can Hurt a Business
Poor conference calls, particularly poor audio quality, is a huge threat to productivity. A conference call that has bad audio quality can destroy a meeting, and it has a negative impact on the mental state of the people in the conference call.
Background Noise Negatively Affects Brain Activity
One of the biggest problems with poor audio during a conference call is that it kills the concentration of all participants. According to some governmental regulatory organizations, background noise can raise a person’s stress level. It can cause migraines and increase the seriousness of stress-related health issues, like high blood pressure and coronary disease.
When a person is trying to focus, but their brain needs to sort through background noise, they may experience sensory overload that can flood their brain, causing it to release cortisol. This is a stress hormone that inhibits the function of the prefrontal cortex. It affects planning, reasoning, and impulse control. It’s clear to see the negative impact a poor conference call can have on employees, clients, and customers struggling to hear.
Fighting to Understand Coworkers’ Speech Minimizes Cognitive Functions
Studies done on elderly individuals who are experiencing hearing loss show that as their struggle to understand the speech of others increases, their brain’s ability to encode what they hear in the memory decreases. This is because struggling to hear what is being said draws on cognitive resources that would otherwise be used for memory.
Struggling to listen to a poor conference call can be classified as “effortful listening.” This type of listening is associated with pupil dilation and reduced cognitive performance.
Poor Audio Quality Leads to Brain Fatigue
The human brain has difficulty multitasking with hearing. The brain reacts first to the loudest input source. Poor conference calls can generate several negative audio issues, such as background, echo, or static. The brain has to focus on the most important source of sound. If your customers or employees feel exhausted after conference calls, they will have a negative impression of your business and brand.
Benefiting from Successful Conference Calls
High-quality conference calls lead to productive meetings and clear communication. Misunderstanding are avoided. When the audio of a calling bridge is clear and easy to understand, all participants walk away with a good impression of the individual or the business behind the call.
Your customers or employees may be reluctant to do conference calls because they think that they are difficult to set up or worry that they will miss pertinent information. However, using a calling bridge gets rid of those challenges. Calls are easy to set up, quality is clear, and everyone walks away from the meeting feeling like they were heard and were able to be heard.
from Feedster https://www.feedster.com/tech-and-gadgets/beginners-guide-to-conference-calls/
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