A physical meeting or a video conference? Well, if you all are working in the same building, then getting together in a meeting room may be a good solution. But what about distributed businesses? Remote workers? It won’t be that easy to gather them for a meeting.
The statistics show that remote work grew 44% in the last five years. The reasons are many – companies optimizing their costs by hiring professionals from countries with lower average salaries, employees wanting more flexibility, and, of course, the Covid-19 pandemic that forced even those who preferred office work into the remote mode. In all these situations, holding physical meetings becomes difficult, if not impossible.
Thus, companies replace face-to-face meetings with video conferences. If we look at the stats again, we will see that adoption of video conferencing has grown tremendously – by 535% – in 2020. Such growth is by no means random – video conferencing services have multiple benefits, and companies that recognize them and reshape their internal communication strategy accordingly will definitely see an improvement in work efficiency and productivity.
What are the benefits of video conferencing?
The benefits of video conferencing technologies for businesses extend beyond the obvious convenience of the employees. There are a wide range of tangible benefits from using this technology, which means at the end of the day, the implementation of conferencing tools turns out advantageous for both business owners and their personnel.
Time and cost savings
When compared to physical meetings, on-line conferencing offers significant time and cost savings, especially in the remote work conditions. Business meetings organized over a video communication channel, means you can cut down on travel time and save money on associated business travel costs.
These reduced costs are especially visible in geographically distributed teams. Of course, such teams never hold their daily meetings in person, but often organize offline training sessions or conferences. Holding training online in the video conferencing format will significantly reduce the costs and time required to organize and attend the training.
High attendee engagement
Video conferences are similar to offline meetings in that the attendees see each other in real-time. During video meetings, everyone has to be actually “present” and maintain virtual eye contact with other participants as well as control their facial expressions.
Attending a video meeting might require some additional preparations, which can also create the right attitude and boost engagement. Of course, as we have seen on multiple videos, there may be unexpected turns, such as kids or pets suddenly appearing on screen, but often such interruptions help to relax the atmosphere and ease the conversation.
Improved communications
People perceive and process visual information better than audial. Important information–that can be derived from someone’s body language, gestures, or facial expression and that can enhance our understanding– would be otherwise missed if we relied solely on written and audio forms of communication. For this reason, getting the team together in virtual meetings over video conferencing software can be more efficient than phone calls, live chats, or email.
This effect is especially important for training sessions when trainees can learn more and get stronger knowledge and skills when they perceive visual information. At the same time, regular business meetings can also benefit from meeting visually on-line.
Stronger team connection and collaboration
Organizing a distributed team or remote work is a challenge in itself. The team leads need to rely heavily on their remote employees’ self-discipline, dedication, time management and planning skills to ensure productivity. In most businesses, success is a team effort, therefore, it is critical to achieve sufficient cohesion and a strong sense of camaraderie among employees.
Here, the ability to see your teammates’ faces during an online meeting plays a key role. During a video call, the team members not only exchange information. They also see each other’s facial expressions and body language that they interpret subconsciously as if in real human communication. Visual communication helps to build trust within the team, strengthening relationships, and, as a result, improving collaboration.
Higher meeting efficiency
During a video call, it is next to impossible to get distracted or do other tasks. Everyone has to pay attention and be ready to contribute to the discussion. When meetings are held using video conferencing tools, the attendees tend to be more focused and better prepared.
As a result, the meeting can be successful within a shorter time leaving people more productive hours for other tasks or giving them free time.
Improved employee satisfaction and retention
The Covid-19 pandemic made the world reevaluate the adopted ways of working, and one of the takeaways was the realization that remote work can be as efficient as in-house. On the other hand, employees have also appreciated the flexibility and time-savings working from home gives them and insist on having this option even when the pandemic is over, because it leads to a healthy work-life balance. 39% of employees are prepared to quit their jobs if forced to come back to the office full-time.
This is something businesses need to take into account, and here video conferencing becomes a great solution. It allows maintaining constant contact with the employees, joining efforts to resolve eventual issues, and generally keeping them on the same page while supporting their desire to work remotely. On the other hand, the employees will appreciate the company’s willingness to provide flexible working conditions, and their loyalty and dedication will remain at a high level. Employee satisfaction can improve employee retention rates and enhance employee productivity.
Competitive advantages
This paragraph is a sum total of all the numerous benefits of video conferencing described above. Once you have implemented this communication tool and adjusted your flows to hold online-meetings instead of offline ones or audio calls, you will see certain improvement in many aspects of your business. Your planning will become more accurate, your team collaboration will get stronger, business relationships stronger, and your overall productivity will become higher.
At the end of the day, it may very well happen that video conferencing, as part of the smart business organization and digitalization, will become a competitive advantage making you stand out from among the competitors.
How to implement video conferencing for your business?
If you are looking for a secure, high-performance, reliable, and device-agnostic video conferencing solution, consider a tool that uses WebRTC. It is a network protocol specially designed for real-time communication. WebRTC has proved its suitability for audio and video conferencing and can be used as the core of a robust and scalable enterprise solution.
QuickBlox uses WebRTC in its video communication product that can be easily configured and customized for the purposes of a particular business. With QuickBlox video conferencing, you are getting a complete set of communication features that will take your meeting organization to a new level:
- Multi-party conferencing allowing to hold online meetings in teams of any size;
- Collaboration tools such as screen sharing and file sharing for conducting demonstrations and training sessions;
- Recording for storing the meeting content for future references;
- HIPAA and GDPR compliance allowing to use video conferencing in various applications, including those handling sensitive information;
- Security provided by the underlying WebRTC protocol.
We invite businesses looking for ways to integrate video conferencing platforms in their processes to consider the QuickBlox solution. QuickBlox conferencing solution is also offered as a while-labeled product, which means you can turn it into a unique branded video conferencing system tailored to the requirements of your business. Contact us for more information!
