For many among the forced ‘remote revolution’ this year, video conferencing has been a tedious inevitability of endless team meetings reassuring insecure managers — taking up time that could have been spent actually doing the work.
But for Kaltura’s Jeff Rubenstein, this use of video is just one aspect of its value, and their latest research with 1,000 US-based knowledge-workers reflects the changing role of video communication in the newly-distributed workplace. As Rubenstein explained, synchronous group meetings on videocall are only one of 3 important workplace roles for this rich medium, and their platform makes it easy to deploy two other important functions.
The virtual town hall
The first of these is the synchronous broadcast — for which some organisations attempt to repurpose meeting tools, but really require a bespoke application to deliver quality at scale.
“For broadcast mode, you need a technology that can scale to 100,000 or a million users. And we’re seeing more and more CEOs using this well, particularly in times of crisis. It puts a very human face on what can feel like an inhuman process and situation,” he explained, mentioning the famous address from Arne Sorenson of Marriott Hotels in response to the COVID-19 crisis. In this address Sorenson delivered news of devastating cutbacks with a warmth and humanity which won great acclaim, and it now has thousands of external views, adding brand value at a critical time for the global hotel chain. This video had an impact it’s hard to imagine any other format managing to compete with.
There’s also growing use of Kaltura’s third pillar of the video tool suite, asynchronous on-demand video — which brings the richness of the medium under the recipient’s power to consume at will. Rubenstein pointed out:
“Onboarding and training is one critical role, now that people are being hired without even seeing their colleagues in an office. You can send out a laptop, but how do you embed that person in the culture, and get them up the productivity curve?”
While this use case remains emergent compared with the endless real-time calls, 42% of their survey respondents expressed a wish for flexible video options — like pre-recorded messages — and 60% believe that this is the best way to welcome new colleagues.
