1. There’s a lot of talk in the industry around how important voice will be in 2022. Is video as important now as it was in 2020? Why?
Sof Socratous, Vice President, Sales, Northern Europe at Poly:
“Voice has and will always be key to collaboration, but how we use it is changing. For example, we’re seeing a trend in users using voice over Microsoft Teams, rather than traditional telephony. This has been especially evident during the shift to hybrid working.”
“However, video will remain just as important as visual elements play a key role in making hybrid working a success and keeping workers connected. Face-to-face interaction is more engaging, and so meeting participants with their camera on is a simple but powerful step towards better collaboration. It also improves the quality of interpersonal interactions, enabling participants to pick up on facial expressions, body language, and discourages them from multitasking.”
“The prevalence of video calls in our hybrid working reality has a significant impact on overall work culture. In 2022, business leaders must realise that both voice and video are equally important and pairing the two will be the key to a successful hybrid future.”
Mark Needham, EMEAR Hybrid Work Leader at Cisco:
“Enterprise-grade voice experiences have always been fundamental to organisations, and the cloud migration is accelerating, but the explosion of video is continuing unabated. Hybrid work is becoming the norm and making a success of Hybrid Work means breaking down the barriers between locations, time zones, languages, environments, and personal preferences. This dynamism needs an exceptional video experience to ensure that everyone can contribute equally, from anywhere, and video is core to that.”
“By 2024 Gartner estimates that only 25% of enterprise meetings will take place in person (1). The ability to read, in high-definition, body language and reactions provides the clarity of understanding required in this more dispersed mode. It is critical to organisational success In a Hybrid World. If you look to the world of academia, it has been shown that 93% of all communication is nonverbal (2).”
“That’s a lot of risk to communication and collaboration if the video experience is not the best possible. From an employee’s perspective 58% say that access to high quality audio and video is the most important factor for work from home success (Dimensional Research, 2021).”
Lauren Simmen, Director of Commercial Product Marketing at Crestron:
“They are equally important. While it’s true that if a video signal drops, audio will allow you to continue that hybrid meeting with all the attendees, there’s now an expectation that participants should be on-camera (unless they’ve given a specific reason to shut off the video image). If you’re remote, video is really how you prove you are present in that meeting.”
“Beyond that, it’s an issue of “meeting equity” — having sound and vision work in parallel to ensure that no matter whether a participant is remote or in person, the audio and video are working together for everyone so that every person can be heard equally and every person can be seen equally.”
Bryce Page, Senior Product Marketing Manager at GoTo:
“Digital transformation and contact centre are driving much of the importance behind voice this year. Video is a cornerstone of collaboration but the shifts in workplace and hybrid have SMB customers rethinking their strategies long-term.”
“Some 66% of SMB customers are considering a move to the cloud, driven by both on-premise limitations for flexible work and the impact it has on rapidly-accelerated contact centre plans. So while video is and remains important, many customers are more concerned with their voice & contact center plans this year.”
2. What challenges do businesses face when it comes to optimising video in hybrid working environments?
Sof Socratous, Vice President, Sales, Northern Europe at Poly:
“A challenge businesses face when it comes to optimising video is ensuring that all employees have an equal experience, no matter where they are located.”
“To overcome this, it’s important to take a people-first approach. This involves considering employee personas and how spaces will be used to ensure they adopt the right video technology.”
“Organisations need to understand what the office will be used for and how to integrate remote workers, and therein invest in video bars and webcams that fit the right spaces. Doing so will allow for video to be optimised, while offering an equal experience for all.”
Mark Needham, EMEAR Hybrid Work Leader at Cisco:
“For many they have been reliant on laptop-based video for the first time in their careers during the pandemic, an experience which leads to poor health, fatigue, and disengagement. Companies need to move to the provision of dedicated video devices for employees whose roles carry a higher level of collaboration intensity on hot desks and in home offices (alongside the more traditional meeting rooms).”
“Additionally, employees are jumping from one meeting platform to the next, so a device with is native to only one platform is an inhibitor to fueling successful hybrid work. Successful Hybrid work is about the ability to excel at all aspects of your role from any location, both with people internally and externally hence the need for a high-quality consistent experience across the 4 largest platforms (Webex, Microsoft, Zoom and Google) via the single click of a button on a UI.”
“Thirdly, 47% of meeting attendees are not speaking when attending meetings (1), without leveraging video these attendees’ sentiments and views are not being represented, the meeting is not fully inclusive, and you will not achieve the best possible outcome. Meeting analytics will help visualise these trends so the meeting can be optimised.”
Lauren Simmen, Director of Commercial Product Marketing at Crestron:
“That is a great question — and there’s a lot of them. The biggest challenge is optimizing the room experience for the right video needs or capabilities.”
“The cameras and the technologies that are best for a training facility are going to be vastly different than in a board room, and different in a huddle space.”
“If a single person is presenting, a single camera may be enough — but a hybrid collaboration with remote and in-person attendees will demand more cameras — and more camera angles — for the proper experience.”
“If several people are having a video conference in a huddle room, and one in-person attendee turns his or her head to speak to someone else, the last thing you want to have happen is your workers seeing the back of someone’s head. In that moment, you’ve diminished the collaborative experience by excluding someone.”
Bryce Page, Senior Product Marketing Manager at GoTo:
“66% of workers say it’s harder to communicate & collaborate away from the office. Video is an expectation but engagement and efficacy are newer issues that businesses are still navigating.”
“Some are relying more on tools to replicate the in-person experience like annotation or drawing, while other businesses are navigating changing their culture to be more inclusive of hybrid work—all while their IT teams are managing 1000s of devices and risks remotely.”
“The future of work is changing and over 40% of SMB IT leaders feel they’re unsure of what comes next.”
3. What technologies/trends do you expect to take hold of video this year?
Sof Socratous, Vice President, Sales, Northern Europe at Poly:
“Video conferencing bars, with built-in native software experiences (e.g. Zoom and Microsoft Teams), will play a starring role in the development of collaboration spaces in offices. This will help to ensure that workers have a consistent experience no matter where they are located or who they are collaborating with.”
“We can expect that AI will continue to play an important part of enhancing the collaboration experience of a meeting. For example, with Poly’s AI functionality and noise blocking solutions, meeting participants can focus on the speaker and not become distracted by other sounds.”
“AI-enabled speaker tracking functionalities in video bars can also bring added benefits to enhance the meeting experience. For example, there is no need to re-position cameras if an attendee is joined in the room by colleagues, enabling employees to command the conversation with
confidence.”
“In the future, we can also expect AV systems to have facial recognition built-in that is able to identify users, know what’s in their calendar and ask them if they would like to start their meeting – all with optimal privacy and security measures in place.”
Mark Needham, EMEAR Hybrid Work Leader at Cisco:
“Firstly, the migration of video from enclosed offices to hot desks and the open plan. Employees are not attending offices to do their head down solo work, that is happening at home. They attend an office for the richest collaboration experiences, every space needs to be readied for inclusive collaboration.”
“Secondly, to increase active engagement in meetings customers are rapidly adopting AI-driven meeting enhancements.”
“We are seeing 1 billion minutes a week of Webex leveraging audio intelligence technology, inclusivity is being driven via secure translation and transcription and users are enhancing their visual cues through the support of gesture-based expressions.”
Lauren Simmen, Director of Commercial Product Marketing at Crestron:
“First and foremost, businesses have come to understand that every potential meeting space needs to be video capable. The hybrid workforce is here to stay.”
“Secondly, the need for intelligent video is one the rise. Solutions that give every attendee what we call “equal pixel real estate” are becoming critical. They foster engagement and productivity.”
“Third, I fully expect to see more and more companies provide dedicated video devices that are completely secure and can be remotely managed by their IT teams.”
“Finally, you’ll see more and more cloud-based management solutions that track everything from device health to licenses to firmware updates, and can alert the right people before a problem becomes a mission-critical issue.”
Bryce Page, Senior Product Marketing Manager at GoTo:
“We’re seeing more SMBs customers consolidating their tech stacks. Video may be the entry point for digital transformation, but it has to be part of a larger strategy to simplify IT overhead. At the same time, there will likely be cycles of investment for in-room solutions as more companies adjust plans for hybrid and employee comfort in new layouts.”
“The reality is that IT has been overextended for two years and leaders are looking for efficiency gains. As that search continues, we expect to see more tightly integrated workflows across UC, where managing communications, contact center and even extended use-cases for IT is possible with less friction and fewer vendors.”
