As businesses continue to grapple with the ramifications of COVID-19 – including social distancing mandates and work-from-home life – video collaboration solutions have emerged as the go-to technology to help address these challenges.
Video conferencing tools are no longer a nice-to-have – they’re an essential core offering that can help partners deliver immediate, tangible benefits to businesses navigating “the new normal.”
According to a recent article by renowned industry analyst Irwin Lazar in No Jitter, video has “emerged as a core technology to support remote work.” His firm recently published a global research study, “Visual Communications and Collaboration: 2020-21,” which surveyed more than 500 companies. The study overwhelmingly demonstrated that the workplace has little appetite to revert to full on-premise implementations. According to the report:
All of these interactions among locations require efficient, feature-rich video solutions. “After all the years of hype,” Lazar concludes, “the age of video conferencing has finally arrived.”
Beyond accommodating the restrictions of social distancing and work-from-home infrastructures, video can deliver a meaningful return on investment for organizations and for the channel partners who support them. Case in point: as businesses set their employees up for seamless video conferencing, they’ll need to ensure that their home offices have sufficient bandwidth to support an increase in video traffic. This alone opens up new opportunities for channel partners to upgrade and manage remote workstations.
Video can also be leveraged to create a collaborative community using video conferences for team-building purposes. Lazar calls this the development of a “video-first culture.” Leadership can offer benefits such as virtual wellness instruction, personal finance classes, social hours, or trivia contests. These interactions allow coworkers to bond, which is seen as vital to successful online collaboration. Plus, it helps deter some of the isolation associated with work-from-home scenarios and reestablishes some of the “perks” of on-site workplaces. For channel partners, being able to supply video solutions that can be used seamlessly and effectively in both professional and more laid-back contexts can translate to deeper loyalty and trust from their customers over time.
However essential video collaboration tools may be, technology is only half the equation. Forbes magazine reminds business owners to develop policies to help employees understand the guidelines and etiquette of company-based video conferencing to improve results. Businesses should conduct training on how to use these platforms securely and avoid some of the missteps that occurred in the first weeks of the pandemic.
Interested in learning more about video conferencing solutions with cielo? Send us an email and we will see how to best serve your businesses' needs.
