- What is a virtual office background?
- Is a virtual office background undermining your professionalism?
- Is there a better solution?
- Additional digital solutions to use with your virtual office
Q: What is a virtual office background? What should I use if I have to take a virtual call at home?
A: A virtual office background is an artificial background used in place of your physical location. If you’re unable to access a virtual office and are forced to take a call at home, using a neutral background for your virtual meeting is the best choice.
Since the beginning of the pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns, virtual meetings have quickly become a regular part of over 60% of American workers’ schedules.
Along with these frequent virtual meetings comes a whole slew of questions about etiquette, engagement, and determining the necessity of these meetings.
In terms of etiquette, many business owners have turned to using a virtual office background in their virtual meetings. These backgrounds are used to change your location’s appearance, but they can be misleading.
In this article, we’ll explain what a virtual office background is, whether or not these backgrounds are detrimental to your professionalism, and if there is a better solution than a virtual background. Finally, we’ll look at some other digital solutions that can benefit your digital operations.
A virtual office background, free or paid, can have a lasting effect on your company’s legitimacy. Keep reading to see what backgrounds and locations you can use to send the best message.
- What is a virtual office background?
- Is a virtual office background undermining your professionalism?
- Is there a better solution?
- Additional digital solutions to use with your virtual office?
What is a virtual office background?
Before diving into a virtual office background for teams, or a virtual office background for zoom, let’s take a moment to explore what a virtual office is, how you use it, and what it does for your business.
What is a virtual office?
Keep in mind that not all virtual offices are created equally. Some of the amenities mentioned below are only available in high-quality virtual offices, like the ones Alliance provides.
A virtual office is a service offered to businesses and entrepreneurs that provides their companies with a professional and well-known address that can be used for business registration, access to physical workspaces and coworking rooms, and a way to integrate other digital tools like virtual phone numbers or digital receptionists, all for a cost-efficient price that saves business owners money.
With a virtual office, you can work from anywhere in the world. With the right provider, you can also register your business in any state in the U.S.
Understandably, the ability to register a business to a legitimate address anywhere in the world is a massive benefit to entrepreneurs hoping to explore the world of digital-first operations. Similarly, the ability to use satellite offices to scale your business is a massive benefit to established business owners wanting to grow their companies.
A satellite office is just any office that’s located outside of your business’s main headquarters. In recent years, several businesses have started using virtual offices as satellite offices because of their cost-efficient price point and reasonable lease length.
Read more: Satellite Office: Your Complete Guide
In the past, renting traditional commercial office space was prohibitively expensive, and the standard lease lasted anywhere from 3-5 years. Not to mention, business owners who secured these leases were responsible for several costs, like a hefty security deposit, rent each month, utilities each month, and general upkeep and office supply restocking.
Essentially, a virtual office is a service that allows established entrepreneurs, fledgling business owners, and everyone in between to start businesses and enjoy remote work without all the headaches that business ownership was once associated with.
Now that you’re familiar with what a virtual office is, let’s look at an explanation of a virtual office background.
A virtual office background is a fake background you digitally insert during a virtual meeting.
With remote work showing no sign of slowing down, virtual meetings have quickly become an occasionally unwelcome addition to the modern labor market.
In the case of a virtual office background, you would use it to cover up your real background to help you appear in a more professional setting.
There are multiple places to get these backgrounds, and you can often insert any image you’d like to use.
Depending on the platform you’re using for virtual meetings, there are likely some virtual office background images that you can choose directly from the application.
For example, if you’re looking for a virtual office background for Teams, or Microsoft Teams, there are several different styles of pre-installed backgrounds that you can use. In addition, Teams, like other platforms, allows you to upload a background image you’d like to use during your meetings.
Alternatively, if you’re on the lookout for a virtual office background for Zoom, this platform also has various pre-installed backgrounds that you can choose. Like Microsoft Teams, Zoom also provides an easy way for virtual meeting hosts and attendees to upload images as a virtual office background when necessary.
Along with the increased number of virtual meetings that employees and business owners are expected to attend comes a whole slew of best practices and meeting etiquette that several individuals are still learning.
Although it might sound appealing to use these backgrounds, there might be better choices.
The problems with virtual office backgrounds
As virtual offices, and by extension, virtual meetings, continue to grow in popularity, the etiquette for these meetings also continues to shift.
Preparing for the future is paramount to any business owner’s long-term success, and oftentimes, using a virtual office background shows a lack of forward thinking.
Read more: This Mindset in Business Can Double Your Success
Unfortunately, using a virtual office background isn’t the best practice. It’s not that you’ll be immediately ostracized for using one, but the impression you give off when using a virtual background isn’t great.
To help explain why, we’ve covered some problems with using a virtual office background below.
- Obvious
- Technical issues
- Unprofessional
Obvious
Virtual office backgrounds are almost always obvious. The lightning will struggle to align with the lighting on your body and face, making it clear that you’re covering the background.
This leads to a lack of authenticity and results in your virtual background looking fake. In many cases, this can be distracting to the other virtual meeting attendees.
Now, some virtual office backgrounds are less obvious than others. The worst kinds of backgrounds to use are those that paste a virtual background of another location, scene, or photo behind your image.
Alternatively, if you are in a position where you have no choice but to use a virtual background, your best choice would be to use a neutral-colored background that won’t cause distractions.
Technical issues
Another issue that comes with using a virtual office background is that the backgrounds might glitch unexpectedly, revealing what’s actually behind you.
Not only is this a huge distraction, but if you were hoping that your background wouldn’t be seen by the others in attendance, there’s nothing you can do once the glitch has happened.
A glitch like this might arise from compatibility issues alone. Some virtual backgrounds aren’t compatible with all devices or software, so you might be using one that just doesn’t work.
In addition, adding new virtual backgrounds and using high-resolution backgrounds might harm your hardware. This might lead to reduced performance or even potential crashes when using video conferencing software with your virtual office background.
Adding a virtual background to your video conferencing software might lead to poor-quality video and audio. This could be blurry images, randomly muting yourself or others, or a pixelated quality to the video itself.
With all these issues to worry about, it makes sense that most business owners avoid using virtual backgrounds when possible.
Unprofessional
Last, using a virtual office background sends the message that you aren’t in a professional setting or are trying to hide something.
First, it displays a lack of credibility. With a virtual office background, it might appear that your business doesn’t have access to a physical workspace or isn’t based in a real location at all, both of which can have a lasting effect on your company’s professionality.
Next, if you’re meeting with potential clients or investors, using a virtual background can make you seem like you’re trying to hide something. This might not be the case, but a blurred image that distorts your surroundings will inherently be less trustworthy than an image that isn’t distorted.
Using an artificial representation of your surroundings makes you seem inauthentic, can cause distractions, and can even impact how consumers perceive your company.
Fortunately, with the right virtual office plan – you won’t ever need to use a virtual background again.
Read more: Alliance Virtual Offices’ Platinum Plus Plan Offers More
What is the solution?
Some companies might enforce the use of a virtual office background with logo, and others might recommend a neutral-toned background, but there are better solutions.
Ideally, you should use a high-quality virtual office with a plan from Alliance Virtual Offices.
Through Alliance, you can secure a virtual office with access to easily-reservable and professional meeting rooms that you can use to attend online meetings. Additionally, we’ve put together a brief list of some of the other qualities that Alliance’s Virtual Offices provide.
- Meeting rooms
- Coworking spaces
- Customizable
- Mail forwarding
- Cost-efficient
- Private
Meeting rooms
Alliance’s Virtual Offices each come with access to easily-reservable meeting rooms you can use for any kind of meeting you might have.
Instead of relying on a virtual office background, you can reserve a quiet and professional meeting room to sit with a background that doesn’t require any obfuscation.
In addition, these meeting rooms can be used for any in-person meetings you might need to host. If you’ve ever tried to host a business meeting in a crowded coffee shop or a hotel conference room, you know how useful this is.
In a coffee shop, you’re giving a fairly unprofessional impression of your business because of the public and unsafe location. In a hotel conference room, you’ll be forced to spend an exorbitant sum of money for any halfway decent meeting room.
Through Alliance, however, you can pick meeting rooms that are fit to host meetings of any size.
Want to host half a dozen new employees for a team meeting? No problem!
How about a larger meeting with 30 potential clients and investors? Again, not an issue.
Because Alliance has so many different virtual offices in our network, you won’t have any issue securing a meeting room that can host as many attendees as you’d like. Similarly, you’ll always have a perfect spot for virtual meetings.
Coworking spaces
If you’ve ever done remote work for an extended time, you likely already understand the struggles that come along with working from home.
You’re working in the same place where you’re eating, sleeping, and relaxing, so it’s very easy to start feeling lethargic. In some cases, working from home can quickly lead to job burnout – so it’s best to do whatever is necessary to avoid these feelings.
Through Alliance Virtual Offices, you have access to easily reservable coworking spaces that you can use to break up the monotony of your day-to-day routine.
Sure, if you’re working remotely, you can always try to use a coffee shop or another quieter public place. Still, in these environments, you risk using public wifi connections and accessing sensitive data around individuals that could be bad actors.
With access to coworking spaces, there’s no reason to take the risk.
Customizable
At Alliance Virtual Offices, we do our best to create fully-customizable virtual offices for business owners to take advantage of.
In the past, business owners had to worry about lengthy commercial leases and all the operational costs associated with running a physical storefront. Now, business owners can pay for what they need, when they need it.
Our virtual offices can easily integrate with the other digital tools we provide, business owners can choose the best plan for their budget and time frame, and with so many different locations, our offices can be used by anyone to start a business anywhere they want.
In the modern labor market, flexibility is paramount to your business’s success. In 2022, almost 40% of American small business owners were unable to pay their rent.
To avoid situations like these, business owners must learn how to run the most cost-efficient business possible.
Read more: How to Run a More Cost-Efficient Business in 2023
Mail forwarding
At Alliance, the mail forwarding add-on can be used to ensure that your business mail is handled safely and securely.
Not to mention, to keep in line with the theme of total customization, there are four separate tiers that you can use depending on your business’s needs. We’ve covered each of these tiers here and will explain when each tier might become necessary.
Once-monthly mail forwarding, $10.00
At only $10.00 per month, this option is a great way for new businesses to start getting a handle on their mailing responsibilities.
If you’re just getting started and want an easy way to ensure that your mail is safely handled and forwarded directly to you, this is a great choice.
Bi-weekly mail forwarding, $20.00
Once you need to have your mail forwarded more than once per month, the bi-weekly, or twice-monthly, option is a great choice.
This allows you to get your mail a bit more regularly without increasing the price of the service by too much. The bi-weekly mail forwarding tier is best used by businesses that are still finding their footing, but are dealing with more mail than brand-new businesses.
Weekly mail forwarding, $30.00
With weekly mail forwarding, you’re getting your mail four times per month and will never go longer than a week without accessing your mail. If you know that you’re going to be receiving government documents or other sensitive information, it can be a great way to ensure that you never miss anything important.
The weekly tier is perfect for business owners that need more frequent mailing than bi-weekly but are unwilling to spend the money for the final tier.
Daily mail forwarding, $70.00
The daily mail forwarding option allows you to get your mail anywhere between 19-22 times per month. If your business is in the middle of any kind of legal dispute or is simply processing a high volume of business mail, this is an excellent way to ensure that you’re always on top of any mail you might receive.
This final tier is reserved for business owners that are receiving a considerable amount of mail and who are unwilling to allow that mail to pile up over time.
As you look through these mail forwarding options, there are a couple of things to keep in mind.
First, the prices above might vary slightly, depending on where your virtual office is located.
Second, the $70.00 per month, daily mail forwarding option offers you the highest value.
On the first and second tiers, you will spend $10.00 every time your mail is delivered. For the third option, you will spend $7.50 every time your mail is delivered.
For the final tier, you’ll only be spending between $3.18-$3.69 every time your mail is forwarded.
Private
In our increasingly digital world, retaining your privacy can feel impossible. Registering your business with your home’s address will make it even more impossible.
This is because as soon as you register your business through your home, your personal information is immediately added to the public domain.
Once it’s there, any bad actors, disgruntled ex-employees or customers, and scam businesses will have easy access to your address, meaning they can easily inundate you with mail, hateful messaging, or whatever else might be on their minds.
Cost-efficient
Best of all, Alliance’s Virtual Offices are a cost-efficient way for new entrepreneurs to start businesses and a cost-efficient way for existing business owners to scale their existing operations.
With reasonably priced plans that start at a 6-month minimum in conjunction with the countless opportunities for customization, there’s no better deal available.
Alliance provides an easy way to eliminate your virtual office background and gives you a cost-efficient and flexible environment to do it in.
Additional digital solutions to use with your virtual office?
Thanks in part to the Great Resignation that started in 2021, 2022 brought about countless new trends that employers now have to act quickly to understand.
From employee wellness to virtual meeting etiquette, the past few years have brought several new ideas to the forefront of public consciousness.
In the case of virtual meetings, a virtual office background won’t do a good job of representing your company.
Instead, you should opt for a genuine Virtual Office.
With a Virtual Office, you can easily add tools like a Live Receptionist to help you better answer customer phone calls while focusing on the more nuanced aspects of your business.
With a Live Receptionist, you provide your customers with a friendly and professional voice that acts as their first point of contact. This allows you to eliminate a position you would have had to hire for otherwise while still benefiting your overall customer relations.
Similarly, you can easily add a Virtual Phone Number to your office to continue increasing your company’s legitimacy.
With Alliance’s Virtual Phone, you can add a professional business phone number to your company’s branding that works in conjunction with your business’s address to give off an air of professionality.
Not to mention, keeping your business calls off of your cell phone helps create a healthier work-life balance while better protecting your privacy.
In addition, unlimited extensions mean you can easily onboard new team members who are given the same privacy benefits as you.
Further reading
- Alliance Virtual Offices’ Platinum Plus Plan Offers More
- How to Run a More Cost-Efficient Business in 2023
- Satellite Office: Your Complete Guide
- This Mindset in Business Can Double Your Success
Alliance Virtual Offices provides solutions for established entrepreneurs, brand-new business owners, and everyone in between.
Instead of using a shoddy virtual office background, consider searching for a high-quality Virtual Office that saves money, increases flexibility, and helps you look more professional.
Contact us today to see how Alliance can help you eliminate the use of a virtual office background, and don’t forget to check out our Virtual Office Blog for more helpful tips and tricks.
