Over the past 5 to 10 years we have seen the structure of business and the way we work change, with increased flexibility and the rise of remote working. Most businesses have staff, clients and suppliers spread across the country, and often the globe. With margins continually being squeezed and businesses needing to do more with less, travelling for face-to-face meetings is not a viable option for many businesses.
This creates a challenge for businesses to maintain effective communication and collaboration, despite being in different locations. Video as a way of communicating has become mainstream for us as consumers, so naturally people expect business to keep up.
When are businesses using video to collaborate?
When distance is an issue
Ideally, we would all like to sit in a room together to collaborate with colleagues, suppliers and clients, but physical distance is often a barrier to this. For most of our clients it is about enhancing communication when face-to-face interaction isn’t possible.
One of our clients, who has over 15 sites across Victoria, was holding monthly face-to-face staff meetings at a central location, losing one day a month on travel, and spending considerable time and money on logistics. The introduction of video conferencing significantly increased productivity and saved time and money, while maintaining high quality staff interaction.
When productivity is key
It’s not always about physical distance. We have a large financial services client who has two offices within walking distance of each other, but found staff were wasting a lot of time moving between buildings for meetings. So they introduced video conferencing to improve productivity while maintaining effective collaboration.
When managing suppliers
We use video conferencing not only for internal meetings, but also with our suppliers. We have frequent supplier meetings where we have 3 or more people from different locations joining. To ensure these meetings are productive, we use video conferencing which enables us to share documents and screens in real-time. Having the visual and audio element helps to ensure that everyone is engaged and what we are trying to achieve is clear to everyone in the meeting. This can be difficult to achieve with audio alone.
No matter the size of the business, large or small, we are seeing more clients looking to use video as a collaboration tool to drive better outcomes and, ultimately, improve their bottom line. With the prevalence of cloud-based video conferencing solutions, we are only going to see video conferencing become more and more common in the workplace.