Why conferencing is still the best solution for your company (vs online meeting)
Boost your business year with a standout conference at Granny Mouse Country House & Spa, which offers the perfect conference and team building venue in the Natal Midlands.
General Manager Sean Granger says, “With specially designed conference packages that include activities such as wine tasting, brandy tasting, our ever-popular MousterChef cooking challenge and green team building options, the team at Granny Mouse is committed to meeting your needs.”
Apart from the activities Sean mentions, there are many reasons why in-person conferences are a staple of most businesses and industries.
While plenty of companies adapted to video conferencing during the pandemic, in-person conferencing, events and meetings are still considered key to business dealings and team building thanks to their unique features.
Face to face meetings improve communication.
Meeting in-person helps you to build trust and create strong business relationships. It is so much easier to communicate clearly and effectively when you can see someone. Studies suggest that at least two thirds of communication can be classed as non-verbal. We transmit messages through our body language, and that can be crucial when you want to gain a clear, unambiguous understanding.
Face to face conferencing helps you build better relationships.
We all thrive on human interaction. So, it is no surprise that meeting speakers, clients and colleagues face to face helps all of us to make deeper connections.
It is more difficult to build business relationships online. Digital conferences tend to be rigid and don’t often deviate from the agenda.
This doesn’t encourage small talk or networking and that can make it hard to build effective relationships.
When you meet someone in the real world, conversations are very different. They include more small talk. It is the unplanned, incidental conversations over a cup of coffee that help us to make connections, find shared interests and ultimately build lasting business associations.
In-person conferences improve productivity and reduce distraction.
It is so easy to be distracted when online. Data from an article on Zippia.com indicated that “employees multitask in at least 41% of meetings” and the most common multitasking behaviours in virtual meetings were checking e-mails (55%), texting (51%), snacking (45%) and social media (39%).
You wouldn’t contemplate replying to an e-mail or glancing through Facebook if you were in a conference room. The etiquette and agreed behaviours of in-person conferences are different to those of online conferences and, as a result, they tend to be more focused and productive.
Technical issues
One of the biggest problems with online conferences are the technical gremlins which always strike at the worst possible moment and make it difficult to communicate effectively. This can have a detrimental impact upon the effectiveness of your conference. It wastes time and is both frustrating and stressful.
In-person conferences are better for collaboration, creativity and brainstorming.
Collaboration and creativity are all about sharing and developing ideas. If you are in the same room this process flows naturally. You can chat, explore, even sketch out ideas. You can see people’s responses to an idea, and you can also gauge when they are not so keen on an idea. Compare this to a virtual situation where you spend your time apologising for talking over someone. Virtual conferences and meetings tend to dampen down the creative process making it clunky and difficult.
When you are bouncing ideas around, there is more opportunity to chit chat, and this can bring unexpected ideas to the fore.
The advantages of travelling to a venue.
When you travel to a conference, you can use the journey to think through the agendas and topics, all of which helps you to prepare and focus long before you arrive. And at the end of the conference, the journey home is a time to reflect.
The level of interaction and questioning is much higher in-person than online.
Sharing drinks, meals and activities outside the conference rooms enables you to get to know people, to make connections and respect each other not only on a professional basis but also personally.
Meeting face-to-face in a neutral venue gives people a space in which they are comfortable to chat openly. You make a deeper connection and there are lots of incidental conversations. The chit chat and small talk often gives you insights that can spark ideas and deepens understanding - away from distractions.
To arrange a conference at Granny Mouse Country House & Spa, please make contact with Veronica on banqueting@grannymouse.co.za
Article Courtesy of www.sanda-marketing.com
