What is productivity? Are you busy being busy? Are you in a meeting to discuss a meeting? Where does video conferencing sit in the world of productivity?
With changes in video conferencing technology, it has fast become more accessible. Improved technology and high definition have resulted in video conferencing being the next best thing to being face-to-face. To top it off, the cost of video conferencing has dramatically reduced with continuous enhancements with technology and an increase in adoption, usage and appetite within a business.
With the increased adoption of video conferencing, the benefits are becoming apparent. One of the key benefits being increased productivity. How does video conferencing increase productivity? Video conferencing increases productivity across a number of themes for business, management, recruitment, staff, and customers.
Business
Video conferencing is fast becoming the first for connecting within a business and with customers. The key benefits for business in a pre-COVID world were the immediate and obvious savings with reduced travel such as transportation to and from the airport, plane tickets, meals, and time lost in travel. Now with working from home largely the norm, there is an increased requirement for quality connections to multiple locations, from the home office to satellite offices and across the globe.
Management
Video conferencing is an invaluable asset for management in today’s changing work world. As we see an increase in satellite offices and a flexible workforce, there is reduction in employees physically being in the office. With more staff working in various locations, the ability to connect naturally, e.g. eye contact, chatting by the water cooler, or simply sharing the lift up to the office, has dramatically reduced. With the reduction in physical contact, managers have a new obstacle of ensuring the staff are engaged and have a sense of personability. A reduction in face-to-face communication can increase the risk of staff feeling disengaged, misunderstandings within your teams (text has no tone), and a HR nightmare where there is non-existent communication. Alas, video has ridden in on its big white horse and saved management from a workforce headache. Video provides the ability to ensure communication is always on; staff feel focused and engaged.
How does video conferencing improve productivity for management?
- Engaged staff have buy-in and want to get the job done!
- It gets your point across to all your staff in multiple sites and ensures projects are completed faster.
- Connecting with all your staff at the same time will ensure that the message is not lost in translation. Management can utilise video conferencing to maintain staff having a sense of connectedness with a clear understanding of expectations and consequently increasing productivity.
Recruitment
Video conferencing is becoming more popular with employers as a means of interviewing potential candidates. Not to mention it provides flexibility for all involved. You could be on holiday and still participate in an interview.
Staff
During a video conference, you can see conference participants’ facial expressions and body language, leading to faster and more effective collaboration. These are both essential aspects of communication that are lost with a telephone call. Allowing a CEO to hold a company-wide meeting in real-time with offices across the globe makes employees feel closer to the home office. Imagine speaking with a manufacturer displaying the prototype you want them to duplicate in crystal clear HD quality. What would have required an expensive and time-consuming, or impossible trip due to restrictions can now be down in minutes from the comfort of your own desktop computer.
Customers
There is no benefit for being second in bringing new products or ideas to market. Video communication creates and maintains a competitive advantage for your business. Teams that communicate through video will share knowledge faster and will be more informed. This reduces the time required to bring a new product or service to your customers. Support departments using video conferencing can establish more personal relationships with their customers, encouraging a much deeper loyalty than just speaking on the phone with a call centre. If you need to manufacture a product, you can verify the quality, make changes, and ensure accuracy through your product’s life cycle. In less than an hour, you can accomplish what it takes your competition to do in a week via shipping the product for review.
Various video conferencing solutions provide a powerful way to enable conferences and other video content to be streamed live or on-demand around the world. Employees, customers, partners, and students can use video to communicate, engage and interact with others at any time, from wherever they are.
Business
Video conferencing offers a solution to bring your team together in a more interactive way, keep your staff engaged, brainstorm ideas, and produce more work with fewer distractions. Keep your staff engaged and focused on the task at hand!
Video conferencing is fast becoming a tool that increases productivity in the workplace. While you are on a teleconference call, you write up your quarterly report, check your email, and text your friend about where you are meeting for lunch. You would say that you are good at multitasking, right? You might want to re-think your strategy. Recent estimates are that you can lose up to 40% of your productivity by multitasking. Change the game and give that 40% back to your business.
In today’s workplace, video conferencing is the game-changer for both employers and employees. If asked, many employers would suggest video conferencing is an efficient means for connecting with staff and reducing, but it provides so much more! Video conferencing products make interactions more personable and engaging for staff.
Contrary to many beliefs. Multitasking impacts productivity and paying quality attention to your task at hand. Did you know staff can lose 40% productivity by multitasking? According to www.psychology today.com, multitasking or task switching is a misnomer with people only able to do one task at a time. As such, we switch between tasks and with this, we lose productivity.
“Task switching is expensive” – There has been a lot of research on task switching. Here’s what we know from the research:
- It takes more time to get tasks completed if you switch between them than if you do them one at a time.
- You make more errors when you switch than if you do one task at a time.
- If the tasks are complex, then these time and error penalties increase.
- Each task switch might waste only 1/10th of a second, but if you do a lot of switching in a day it can add up to a loss of 40% of your productivity.
- Task switching involves several parts of your brain: Brain scans during task switching show activity in four major areas: the pre-frontal cortex is involved in shifting and focusing your attention and selecting which task to do when. The posterior parietal lobe activates rules for each task you switch to, the anterior cingulate gyrus monitors errors, and the pre-motor cortex is preparing for you to move in some way“.
Change the game! Keep your audience engaged and to task.
Don’t lose productivity by lack of focus and concentration. Make sure you’re meeting the one task at hand that requires full engagement and concentration. Keep your team engaged and seamlessly bring your participants together face-to-face. A video conference with CommuniCloud can prove to be a better way to network, whether your colleagues are down the street or on the other side of the globe.
CommuniCloud comes out on top for a state-of-the-art video conference. Built for professionals, we make sure we work with the best technology platforms to bring all participants face-to-face seamlessly. Our service provides you with the power of a flexible, secure, HD video conference through a first-class, subscription-based “all you can meet” collaboration.
Is it time for you to reclaim that 40%? Sign up for a FREE trial today. It’s as simple as providing your name and email. We do not require your credit card details, and there are no hidden costs! You are one click away!