Original article published @ Forbes
When we all thought we were getting back to work face-to-face, Delta strikes, reminding us that hybrid teams are here to stay. While Zoom has undoubtedly become an ally, many other tools can improve your experience while organizing an online meeting. The good news is that now you can have it all in the same place. Zoom released on July 21 a new type of in-product integration, Zoom apps, that lets you bring your favorite apps right into your Zoom Meetings, allowing you to access them directly.
Zoom Apps helps you get more done together with the ability for everyone to access and work in the same apps in your meetings. You can also share and send Zoom Apps directly within your sessions to other attendees to facilitate collaboration and engagement. No more extra links are needed!
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As a speaker, I have to confess I struggled anytime I needed to use another app in combination with Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams. For example, while sharing a link during a meeting to access a poll or do a brainstorming session may seem straightforward, not everyone got it right the first time, and it would take several minutes to get started with the real work.
Some of my favorite apps I recommend you try in your Zoom meeting:
- Mural: collaborate visually in real-time. You can organize brainstorming sessions, use sticky notes, do multi-voting and save the work to continue collaboration asynchronously. With the MURAL App for Zoom, you can now share a mural inside of a Zoom meeting so that all participants can collaborate visually in real time. This is great news, especially now that Mural is FREE for everyone! And it is integrated with Microsoft Teams and Webex.
- Pexels: find free images and virtual backgrounds
- Mentimeter: conduct live polls, quizzes, word clouds and Q&A’s.
- Asana and Wrike to create actionable items, organize meetings and assign task owners during and after meetings. I wish Zoom would also add Sunsama, combining to-dos, calendars, emails, and tasks in a single view.
- Thrive resets, the app developed by Arianna Huffington, founder and CEO of Thrive Global, to include 60-seconds resets focused on breathing, gratitude, stretching and mindfulness in every meeting.
Hopefully, now with some of our favorite apps embedded in Zoom, meetings can flow more seamlessly. While we all crave more face-to-face sessions, hybrid collaboration is here to stay. The more we improve how we collaborate to reduce friction, the more we will get done with less effort. It is not about if we have to work remotely, but how we go about it better each day.
