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A common predicament among IT heads is that while there’s interest in utilizing conferencing technology in a more meaningful way, there isn’t enough of a push within most company cultures to truly start integrating video. That’s because, to many, web conferencing is still an obtuse tech. Conference calls are still synonymous with aging hardware and wait times, and the cost of telecommunications is daunting to companies that are, above all, trying to cut costs while making their money.
The truth, however, is that web calling really isn’t as expensive or taxing on your broadband as many businesses might think. This is an especially prevalent misconception among small businesses. However, they do need to risk more and invest much more to grow at all. It’s not difficult to implement, either. As LifeHacker points out, by working on your router’s Quality of Service and making a few efficiencies, you’ll have a better quality experience.
When it comes to properly and effectively introducing a new technology into a company, it’s all about knowing where to start, and how to start. A good place to start, of course, is in the regular company meeting.
Revolutionizing Your Meetings
Do you have project briefs? Do you schedule weekly sit-downs with the rest of the business team, and go over the details you previously discussed with clients regarding your service? Among many things you might be discussing include the editing and publishing of a novel manuscript or the web design of a new overhaul for a major company. Whatever the case, most companies – including small businesses – run regular meets.
However, your average regular meeting really tends to be not much more than a waste of time. For one, we all have much too many of them. They are great, and necessary even. After all, they allow a company to come together and communicate clearly on the division of labor within a project or several projects. They also make for a great way to answer and address any questions that might have come up between meetings, and can make way for suggestions to better deal with a tough project or client.
However, they can also become large liabilities for companies trying to run a sharp and efficient shop. For one, they often suffer the fact that they’re uncoordinated and a shot in the dark. They’re done as routine, and they’re treated not as a brain storming session but as a break, a time to waste time. This is appreciated by some with a little nap, and disdained by others, who try to get some work in by checking their emails, taking unrelated notes, or working on another project.
Meetings, in other words, rarely do what they intend to do. They may end up not benefiting a company, and more directly, they rarely help employees pull together and achieve a measurable result or come to a conclusive decision at the end.
If what you need is a daily announcement, then there are other and better ways to cheaply and quickly do what you need to do. If what you want is actual contribution, conversation, and a way forward for whatever it is that you and your project team are currently working on, then you need a way to make your meetings more efficient. Believe it or not, multi user video conferencing for IT through systems like Blue Jeans can be the answer.
Use Location to Your Benefit
Web conferences remove the sense of interruption from a meeting by allowing everyone to join in on the brain storming from their very own seats. This is where all the work happens. A lot of the inefficiency is psychological. People work when they’re at their workstations, and they don’t when you remove them from their workstations.
Stuff them into a room and you tend to take them out of the work mindset, unless you initiate them somehow. The easiest way to keep everyone’s mind on what they’re doing is to address them while they’re working. That means you should engage them when they’re at their most work-oriented.
Video, then, trumps pure audio. As TechTarget notes, you can’t tell what someone is doing in an audio call, but in a conference call, every member of the meeting is in full view to everyone else, with an equal amount of screen share. You have to appear attentive in such a call. As a result, when you try to look attentive, you tend to actually be more attentive.
Video calls also work as impromptu calls for help while working on something across departments and countries. This is also true for queuries between businesses. Today, video is nowhere as complicated to initiate as it used to be in the past. It’s not even a question of being on the right computer. It doesn’t matter if you’re at home on your tablet or in the office on your desktop. Whatever the case, you can answer and start calls from any online device, as long as you get access to the right service. If you want to integrate video into your business, start small, and make it as easy as possible to adapt.
