Small businesses without the Fortune 500 budget can take advantage of Fortune 500 level technology to cut the expenses associated with meetings to nearly nothing. Video conferencing is the not the future, it’s a tool you can use right now to pull your teams together and engage everyone in moving forward instead of running around in circles.
How to Herd Cats 101
You are in Los Angeles, but your supplier is in Baoji, China, your engineering firm is in in Berlin, and your machinist’s shop is in Mobile. Welcome to the real meaning of worldwide business – a huge phone bill, travel expenses, and a lot of headaches. However, if you think that the top companies worldwide have all the same headaches you do, you’d be partially right. They have a lot of the same problems, but their solutions are different. Yes, many have a budget for flying people around, booking hotels, and booking conference rooms, but for the most part, they don’t. If you want to know why, ask your teenager about Skype video calls and we can go from there.
At the level of the ‘C’ executives, BlueJeans Multi-point video meetings is already taking off. A staggering 65 percent of CIOs (Chief Information Officers) believe that the humble desktop telephone is going the way of the telex machine and will be obsolete by 2017, according to Telepresence Options, and a 56 percent majority of CFOs (Chief Financial Officers) would reduce their travel budgets after investing in video conferencing services and equipment. With the lower cost of cloud based solutions kicking traditional (and expensive) Enterprise based video conferencing in the slats, according to Infonetics, the benefits and savings of video conferencing are about to be felt among the smaller businesses who once thought such technology as out of reach as a Boeing Business Jet.
Rules of Engagement
Communicating with teams in different locations can be hard enough just across town, but across the country and across oceans, a lot can be lost in a phone call or an email. Engaging your teams involves more than clear verbal or written communication, there are a lot of visual cues that round out a face to face conversation. With 87 percent of video conferencing users reporting to Gigaom Research that they feel more connected to geographically dispersed parts of the team and more engaged with the process, video conferencing is a team building tool in the way that even social media, email, or telephone calls cannot replicate.
As the workforce ages, younger workers entering the workplace have been using similar video based applications since their teens to communicate with each other. Even the venerable Yahoo Messenger had a video chat feature, but it is MSN’s Skype service that effectively laid the groundwork for the modern, cloud based video conferencing services and apps today. No longer requiring a room based system, today’s video conferencing can be carried out from any place with a connection – that is to say anywhere from the office on a desktop, to a conference room, to the local Starbucks on an iPad, or even in multiple locations all over the world. Engaging your team with familiar technology and incorporating it into your workflow can increase engagement and correspondingly raise productivity through collaboration.
All Aboard!
Video calling as a whole is booming with the total number of individual users estimated to hit 16.4 million by 2015, according to Social Media Today, and using 550 million minutes per year – or 9.1 million hours. With video conferencing for business a growing industry, even Google and Cisco are getting in on the act. Use of cloud based video conferencing is growing not only in business, but in higher education at top universities, in government agencies, among Silicon Valley heavy hitters like Facebook, international law and accounting firms, and even the Crocs shoe manufacturer. Bringing in and updating your communications technology can only help draw your teams together, improve communication and workflow, and help boost productivity across the board in all departments.
An easy to set up, easy to deploy, user friendly cloud based video conferencing service should be the top item on your shopping list for your business, over and above any other technology. As a rule of thumb, if you need a special department to run it, unless you are a large multinational, it’s probably not the best bet for your business, your sanity, or your budget. Evaluate the services on ease of use, support services, and of course on user reviews. Above all, do not be talked into a larger, more expensive, less modern system simply because it has a more impressive price tag. There’s nothing impressive about needing to constantly call the IT guy or customer support when you need to have an important meeting.