How many times every week do you crowd into a conference room with your team, huddle around the phone and connect to another group doing the exact same thing somewhere else? As you are unable to see one another, interruptions or distractions are often unnoticed and can throw everyone off track, meaning just a few speakers end up dominating the conversation. In this light, traditional conference calls often fall short of a full communication experience, limiting the productivity of what could be countless dynamic long-distance working relationships.
For a time, the opportunity to get everyone on the line at the same time outweighed this potential loss. However, as technology has advanced to make it easier than ever to connect with people visually in real-time, people have clamored for a similar revolution in their corporate lives. Today, the enterprise world looks primed to finally adopt web-based video conferencing as its go-to method of remote communication, bringing people together in a more intimate and powerful way than ever.
Here are three signs this trend is here to stay, and reasons your business should explore web-based video conferencing options today:
More agile workforce
Once upon a time, most businesses required their employees to work from their desks from 9-5, adhere to a strict suit-and-tie dress code and connect with their peers in regularly-scheduled conference room meetings. Today’s businesses look radically different, with employees located around the world working where and when it is most convenient for them. This fast-paced business environment has necessarily changed the way people meet and collaborate. Meeting rooms have gotten much smaller and more informal, replacing large, dedicated conference rooms. To foster teamwork and engagement in these new groups, companies can now outfit each employee with video capabilities. For a more professional setting, companies can establish web-based video conferencing platforms in meeting rooms, as well.
Optimize your business for better collaboration
The modern office looks nothing like the suit-and-tie world that relied on traditional conference calls.
Magnified expectations
While traditional conference calling may have once seemed like the best way to connect with employees away from the office, the newest members of the workforce have far higher standards for what constitutes quality conferencing. Recent graduates, for example, were able to Skype their parents from their dorm rooms and connect with their friends on FaceTime as easily as through a phone call. While these technologies themselves are not up to enterprise standards, they are fast approaching a high-end experience, with some service providers offering high definition video conferencing from laptop or smart-device cameras.
A recent Cisco survey cited by Microsoft encapsulated this trend in a few salient statistics:
- 84 percent of young professionals believe they’ll use video conferencing for a minimum of one in four interactions.
- 75 percent said they would not settle for low-quality video conferencing.
- 87 percent of respondents would rather work for a company that has invested in video conferencing technology.
Optimized for business
As companies seek affordable video conferencing solutions, some will be tempted to simply use personal solutions designed for connecting individual consumers. While these options are certainly easy to configure and budget for, they fail to truly solve businesses’ most basic need – connecting groups of people to one another. They might make it easy for a pair of individuals to converse, but fail to deliver the security and reliability businesses truly count on.
In addition to providing top-notch quality, web-based video conferencing solutions offer business-centric features, such as screen annotating, polling and more, bringing conferences to life online and allowing teams of remote workers to connect and collaborate almost as naturally as if they were in the same room. For help choosing the web-based video technology that’s right for your business, trust the corporate technology consultants at ARG.
