How Can Unified Communications Encourage Collaboration at the Office?

Web conferencing is more than just reducing travel cost, according to ClearOne. It is live communication. While it is true that through web conferencing employees from different cities and countries of the world come together for the benefit of workplace collaboration but this does much more than just cutting travelling and other overhead expenses. In this unique process, employees learn that they must collaborate with each other to have unified communications to truly succeed as teams. It lets you share important documents, improve communication and collaborate more easily across teams.

So, how can web conferencing bring employees together and make them work towards a common goal? Here is how it works.

Increases productivity in dispersed teams

Web conferencing is ideal for organizations that have teams dispersed not just across the city but often time spanning across many countries. While working with a multi-ethnic, multi cultural team sounds exciting, it is also a very difficult and challenging task to remove any and all types of miscommunications.

Some cultures like Japanese rely heavily on non-verbal cues during communication and other cultures like American and British rely mostly on verbal communication. This communication can lose its meaning in phones, emails and texts. However, when you bring web conferencing into the scenario, the communication process improves drastically. Network companies like the Blue Jeans Network ensure that your web conferencing experience is as close and real as when you are talking face-to-face, thus removing all communication barriers.

When team members communicate to each other via video-conferencing, they can immediately give their feedback to each other. All expressions of agreement, confusion, satisfaction, concurrence are accommodated in a web conferencing experience. This whole process is much faster than when it is through the traditional e-mails, voice messages and texts.

Increases hiring talent quality

Before web conferencing became as advanced as it is now, hiring was a much more time consuming process. Hiring top talent was a priority even then. However, there was a challenge as often times the right match for the organization could be located in a different or an altogether different country.

This meant that it took more time for the human resource team to collaborate amongst one another as there would be multiple people involved in the hiring process because of dispersed locations. The department head might have different criteria, while the CEO might have a different one regarding the new hire.

Web conferencing removes all the barriers impeding the hiring of top talent. Now multiple people, across the board, can come online at the same time and interview and evaluate a potential employee, giving their feedback to each other immediately. The video interviews can also be recorded, to the greater convenience of all the team members.

Retains good employees

The web conferencing facility increases real-time communication and collaboration across teams. Thus, even employees who are working in remote areas or employees who work from home, feel they are a part of the organization. They feel they can significantly contribute to the workforce and hence are more motivated and willing to take part in team collaboration efforts.

Blue Jeans Network makes sure your organization does not have to let go of its valued employees because there is no such things as communication barriers when you are with web conferencing.

Your team is stronger than before, making you a match for your competitors.

Competitive advantage

Competitive advantage is a big thing to have for any organization and this also is only due to increased collaboration from web conferencing.

Teams that are multi cultural and dispersed over different countries, are more open to experimentation and are likely to try new ideas. Such a culturally rich team can bring new insights to the table, sparking ideas for new products and services.

Likewise, if your organization has manufacturing office based elsewhere and marketing office based in another country, web conferencing brings the whole team closer, increasing team collaboration. As a company, you can keep any eye on product quality, shipment, distribution, and supply chain, all because of the ease provided by web conferencing.

This allows a company to build and retain its competitive advantage because a unified team can roll out new products and services in the market before its competition does.

Improves all aspects of communication

A video call is much more effective than emails and phone calls. Often times, you can only communicate with each other via a live video call. For instance, your production engineer, located in an off-shore site, has to discuss a production problem with you and show you a faulty product. That visual communication is irreplaceable with any mode of communication because as they say’ a picture is worth a thousand words’.

Visually discussing the problem is likely to bring out urgent and immediate solutions. This would not have been possible without web conferencing.

Hence, with all the above benefits of web conferencing, this can be said with certainty that it encourage collaboration at office, bringing teams together and driving productivity through the roof.