If Communication is King, Video Conferencing is Queen

By Michael Chetner, Head of Australia and New Zealand, Zoom

Michael Chetner, Head of Australia and New Zealand, Zoom

There’s no question that the workplace has completely changed from what it was ten years ago. Top on the agenda for most organizations is improving productivity, increasing agility, and evolving to meet the growing demands of a globalized, digital economy. As a result, there has been a huge rise in mobile, internet, and cloud-based technology strategies put at the centre of businesses to enable collaboration across different time zones, travel schedules, and even corporate boundaries.

For the CIOs in particular, one of the greatest challenges in meeting the demands placed upon them by the digital economy, is ensuring their offices and people are always connected. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. There are several issues that contribute to communicating at work, for example Australian bandwidth issues that result in dropped calls and glitchy video, not to mention the increasingly distributed workforce. Workers are demanding flexibility and autonomy through remote working policies. In Australia specifically, the ABS has found that 1.3 million Australians are now choosing to work from home– creating a need for significant changes in how we interact with one another at work.

The Changing Business of Communicating

Recent research from Deloitte reveals the majority (77 percent) of companies do not believe that email is a viable tool for effective communication. Furthermore, only 14 percent of companies believe that their internal processes for decision-making and collaboration are working well.

Intuitive and simple, video conferencing can rival face-to-face interaction, and is a viable alternative for engaging telecommuting employees.

The tides are turning on the old ways of working and communicating. Increasingly, business leaders across the world are harnessing video communications tools as a way to enhance productivity and communication quality amongst staff, while simultaneously driving flexibility and autonomy. Furthermore, video conferencing supports mobile work arrangements, overcoming the challenges of a dispersed population.

The Rise of Video

There can be little doubt that visual interaction is superior to audio or written communication. Firstly, video conferencing is far more engaging than audio conferencing, delivering high levels of integration that closely emulates face-to-face interactions. This in turn leads to improved working relationships across teams, as communications are clearer and more consistent.

In addition, video conferencing enables greater participation, bringing users together when they cannot meet in person. This keeps dispersed teams connected and aligned. It also improves productivity and team optimization, whilst improving efficiency and reducing logistics costs - all of which can energize teams, and encourage more engagement than audio alone.

Businesses today are increasingly dynamic, fast-paced, and global. As such, employees need to be agile and move quickly in order to drive results to move the business forward. CIOs must focus on implementing communication strategies that service the entire workforce, regardless of location – empowering employees to work smarter and more collaboratively. To address the needs of their on-the-go global workforce, video technologies must allow employees to meet from anyway, even from their mobile device 30,000 feet in the air, not just from the conference room.

Intuitive and simple, video conferencing can rival face-to-face interaction, and is a viable alternative when it comes to engaging telecommuting employees. It provides the ideal answer to the productivity challenge for a dispersed, collaborative workplace. Not only that, but video communications technologies have evolved. Thanks to modern architecture, video communications work under low bandwidth environments, reducing pressure on IT teams and their networks, whilst supporting remote workers. And finally, video conferencing can energize teams, and encourage more engagement than audio alone. The reign of the audio conference is over; all hail video.