Many companies provide solutions and services that enhance and enable effective team collaboration. One of the most prominent are Plantronics, their innovative hardware and software solutions transform customer collaboration platforms into the most crucial systems within any organisation. Their extensive range of hardware solutions, including headsets and accessories, coupled with enhancing software tools remove the technical barriers that have been historically problematic for users.
There are other providers globally who provide similar solutions but do they really practice what they preach? Plantronics certainly do. Their own adoption of collaborative tools coupled with the use of their own solutions has transformed their culture, processes and ability to lead the market.
UC Today spoke to their Regional Director for the UK & Ireland, Paul Dunne, about how their own collaboration journey has given them a unique insight and ability to help customers with their development.
Plantronics have been able to transform their own infrastructure by utilising collaboration and unified communication solutions. Many business and organisations are looking for ways to reduce their impact on the environment, leverage capital and streamline processes. In Plantronics’ case they were able consolidate their offices in the United Kingdom and offer their people more flexibility and choice by utilising collaboration platforms, negating the need to have all users in various regional offices. Working from home, or a remote location is now a reality but they have retained their state of the art central locations for staff, and the benefits of this hybrid model are huge.
“Once you consolidate your property portfolio you get a huge number of business advantages. Not only the huge cost reductions, or capital realisation, but the ability to attract and recruit talent from a much broader area and the business continuity benefits. If there is a snow storm everyone can still work.”
“There is a distinct competitive advantage for businesses who can manage to retain that collaborative culture within their business, despite the fact that all of their people are working remotely.
However a huge transition like this required much evaluation, analysis and planning from Plantronics to ensure its success. They realised quickly that enabling remote working meant the value placed on voice communication increases massively. Although Plantronics use a lot of video communication and collaboration tools the option is not always feasible in public settings so audio becomes even more vital. Hardware wise, as an innovator in the industry, ensuring quality using their own solutions was not a concern. Their range of headsets enable various optimisations to ensure that no compromises are made talking to someone remotely when previously they might have been in the office in front of you. Plantronics embarked on a regime of professional voice coaching for staff to aide them with their collaboration journey.
“We got groups of people together in a room with a professional voice coach. We talked about how we use our voices, how we vary pitch, volume, tone all the key elements of our voice. We called it speech impact training and it all centred on how to make the right impression when someone who you are communicating with can’t see you.”
Considering details like this have ensured that Plantronics use of collaboration has had the maximum positive impact internally, without any of the user adoption dilemmas that so many businesses have encountered.
They didn’t only consider voice, in the early days user education was critical and as a team they worked to ensure the etiquette of remote meetings was established. Joining meetings in plenty of time, ensuring background noise was muted and that focus was maintained were all critical focuses.
Paul then explained that possibly the most crucial philosophy of their collaboration journey was in uniting three very critical parts of the business, the three ‘Bs’.
“What we found was that unless IT, Facilities and HR come together it’s going to be a sub-optimal technology implementation. We termed this phrase ‘Bricks, Bytes and Behaviour.”
‘Bytes’ represents the technical aspect of the project: what is the platform going to be, how will it be implemented, what hardware is required, how to ensure security? But for Plantronics the facility side, ‘Bricks’, was also key, the physical location needs to enable people to be able to communicate, collaborate and concentrate. Finally ‘Behaviour’, users need to know how to best utilise these systems to leverage maximum effect and realise maximum value.
This holistic approach to technology adoption has ensured that Plantronics have been able to consistently develop their use of collaborative solutions and ensure that they are as effective as possible.
If your organisation is considering collaboration and its potential benefits then Plantronics have shown you how, carefully considering all the benefits and ramifications is clearly well worth the effort.
