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The Background in the Online Meeting: 6 Deadly Sins and
how you avoid them

Do you also appreciate the many advantages of the home office? It’s very relaxing to work from home 🏠 but you should also approach virtual meetings in a professional manner. It helps immensely to optimize the background and invest more time in meeting preparation.

It’s worth investing more Time in Meeting Preparation

The Outlook calendar announces that the next meeting is due in 10 minutes. Digitally, of course, via Microsoft Teams. It now feels like no. 455,762. As always, you run through the standard procedure beforehand: quickly push the pile of boxes and the laundry rack into the other corner of the room - which is hidden from view. Instead, place the yucca palm roughly in the middle of the background. Then quickly check again: are all the cupboard doors on the kitchen unit closed? Ok, that’s fine. Then you can enter the virtual conference room with a clear conscience.

Turn the Background into your Stage Backdrop

Does your “daily business” in home office look similar? Do you take a more intuitive approach to meeting preparation and think you can’t be that wrong? Watch out! This “relaxed” approach could cause problems at some point. Try to adopt the perspective of your colleagues and take a fictitious look over your own shoulder. What do you expect others to see - apart from your jogging suit? Joking aside. Sure, you’re the focus - the background is just your stage backdrop. But to make sure it stays that way and that a poorly chosen or even irritating background doesn’t end up stealing the show, we recommend you invest an extra minute or two in preparation.

What you should and shouldn’t do

As always in professional life, there are a few deadly sins that you should definitely have on your list before the next Monday team call or online workshop - so that you can avoid them! 😊

Some Classics

Not like that, please:

  • Open cupboard doors
  • Stacks of cardboard (storage room charm)
  • Laundry rack
  • Window or glass door (you never know what’s going on behind it)
  • Withered houseplant
  • Blank white wall: too boring!

A little better:

  • Well-tended houseplant in front of a single-colored wall
  • Neutral picture or picture wall with coordinated colors
  • Accurate bookshelf

Golden Rule: bring Calm to the Background Setting

You will notice that you can do a lot with a few simple steps. Calm and order are the magic words. And by the way, an inspiring background can serve as an icebreaker at the start of the meeting and generally lighten the mood. If you don’t have time to rack your brains over your background, Microsoft Teams has other solutions for you that are practically: next time, why not try the blurred background or one of the other Teams backgrounds? If you want, you can also become a designer yourself and create a completely individual background. You can get creative here!