Are you worried about your crying baby or kids playing with louder noise which interrupts your important video calls and meetings?
This blog would be useful for you to engage your kids while you attend virtual meetings.
COVID-19 has changed many things in our daily life – be it personal or professional. It would take a quite long time to get back to the normal Pre-COVID days. The pandemic has changed the entire world including the workplace and work routine. During Covid days, work-from-home (WFH) has become common for most of us. In the digital world, work-related communications have turned easier using communication platforms like as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype, and Slack etc.
On the other hand, many of us are finding work-from-home difficult and frustrating for various reasons. And one of the main challenges is that as a parental professional they need to manage their work and kids at home especially for nuclear families without any family members’ support.
Hiring a babysitter or dropping kids at crèche and coordinating playdates for toddlers with their friends and neighbors are not possible now as we need to be safe from getting infections and to ensure social distancing these days.
The work-from-home (WFH) model is not a new concept for IT professionals. But, the impact of Covid-19 had forced many of us to work from home for a longer time than it was anticipated during the beginning of Covid.
Also, the work-from-home scenario has changed a lot due to the COVID pandemic. Because, earlier we were only managing kids of age below 3 years but in covid days we have to manage kids of all ages as everyone is at home due to school closures. Hence, it is hard for working parents to attend important meetings and video conference calls from home while the kids are around.
Positively, the mute option helps to keep our meeting times noise-free when we do not speak. Also, the use of noise cancellation software/applications like Noisegator reduces unwanted background noise and improves the quality of audio at both ends to some extent.
Although we all have been learning to manage the work and kids at home, attending online meetings/video calls and managing our kids is still a challenge. Hence, there is no doubt that it is going to be a foremost need for us.
Here are the top 8 ideas to engage your kids during important online meetings.
First of all, the parental professionals should inform their employers, co-workers, and clients that they have a kid(s) at home and there might be some unexpected noise or disturbance during the meetings. And, this would avoid any surprise to the people on the other end.
Engaging kids is merely dependent on their age and below are few common tips.
(1) Use Sleep Times:
You can plan your important meetings that need your complete attention, during your kid’s sleeping time. Especially, the best way to engage babies below 2 years of age is sleep times. Though it cannot be planned, regularizing their sleep times might be helpful.
Also, for babies, keeping a bottle with water or milk, readily available before a meeting may be useful, if they wake up and/or interrupt during the meeting.
(2) Separate Work room / space:
While working from home, it is highly recommended to have a separate workplace which helps you to isolate yourself from your family chores and to concentrate on your work, especially meetings. Having your kids in a separate room with regular monitoring will also be helpful.
Personally, “When I have an important call, prior to the call, I tell my son (who is 5 years old) that I have an important meeting to attend, so not to disturb me. Then I will let him watch TV in the living hall. I lock myself in a separate room and keep an eye on him. However, he doesn’t listen to me sometimes and keeps knocking on the door .”
(3) Plan Meeting timings:
Managing meeting time is an essential factor. In many families, nowadays when both parents are working from home, attending meetings for both of them is unavoidable. In such a case, you can split work or meeting timings between you and your spouse. You can plan and have the meetings in such a way that your spouse can manage your kids during your absence/meeting time and vice versa.
(4) Entertainment:
Another interesting idea is that you can engage your kids with some entertainment programs. As there are so many mobile applications, fun & educational games and cartoon channels available exclusive for kids, you can explore them and give them access (for safer sites).
Encourage them to play themselves, with their toys, or with their siblings. Also, start a movie of their interest just before the important meeting would be helpful.
(5) Keep Occupied:
Apart from games and TV shows, you can also involve them in other activities like drawing, coloring, painting, simple crafting, connecting/building blocks, puzzles solving and writing their favorites / reading some interesting books or stories.
Even engaging kids with their favorite food items such as cool drinks, dry fruits or nuts, cereals, cookies, candies, and ice creams would also help.
(6) Virtual Engagement:
Identify available resources like grandparents, babysitter, friends, or relatives who can be engaged with your kids online using social media tools like WhatsApp, Instagram, etc.
(7) Use Visual Indications:
It would be helpful if you practice some sort of visual indications to inform your kids that you are in an important meeting/client call and you should not be interrupted. For example, use of headphones during meetings can be a sign.
Use of the ‘Do not disturb’ board at your workspace/door might also act as an indication.
(8) Make Self-dependent:
Training the kids to do their school homework or household task on their own is another idea. They can manage themselves without much support from parents and hence they will not disturb you during the meetings, for their basic needs. It also helps to improve their ability and confidence level.
Every family is different and the situations are different. But I hope the above ideas would help you to engage your kids effectively and make you to fully present during online meetings.
Stay Healthy and Stay Happy…
We look forward to receiving your comments or ideas on your personal experiences.
Share this blog :
Leave a Reply