Video conferencing has become the norm in business with business leaders thinking that companies using the technology to be more collaborative than those that don’t.
According to a new report by Lifesize, 55% believe companies that use video conferencing are more collaborative. The survey of 1,300 business professionals found that half of respondents said they believed that companies that use video conferencing are more innovative with 41% believing companies that use video conferencing have more engaged employees.
Nearly a third of respondents (31 per cent) believed that companies that use video conferencing are more successful.
Workplace Trends
The report looked into the trends that have spurred on video conferencing in the workplace. It found that video has enabled a massive global remote workforce that relies on high quality face-to-face interactions with their teams every day. More than 77 per cent of employees have conducted a video call from a laptop or desktop computer and 31 per cent have used a mobile phone.
It also found that companies are using on smaller huddle rooms for team collaboration. According to recent market trends identified by Frost & Sullivan, huddle rooms are projected to replace almost 70 per cent of all meeting rooms by 2022.
Another trend bolstering video is the expectation of interoperability, flexibility and ease of use for employees. Over half (51 per cent) value video as equally or more important than enterprise chat apps for their day-to-day work.
The report found that millennials now represent the largest generation in the workplace, with Generation X following close behind. Almost two-thirds of both the 18–29 and 30–44 age brackets use video communication at work — with their first experiences often being via Skype. And while both 30–44 and 45–60-year-olds started with legacy web conferencing providers; Millennials are much more spread across modern enterprise cloud video solutions.
Speaking exclusively to UC Today, Michael Helmbrecht, chief operating officer and chief product officer at Lifesize, said that collaboration technologies are becoming more and more an expectation in most customer environments. He said:
“Traditionally, what you would have seen five years ago, or more, is everyone had some type of video communication in a large company, but that was so hard to use, and so expensive to scale that it was very limited to where it was used”
“What’s changed is now you can just use it on your laptop of your phone or browser. But being able to extend that into a whole network and use it with your customers, all your employees or your suppliers, that’s really what changes it.”
Helmbrecht said that one of the biggest changes that’s happened is the move into high quality video being served as a global cloud service. With the likes of Webex, Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, or GoToMeeting, there is situation where customers are really experimenting. He added that most have multiple communication and collaboration solutions as well as multiple video solutions.
“There’s a lot of experimentation with that there’s a lot of inefficiency. The good news is that customers are seeing the opportunity that video brings to engage their teams more and to connect to their customers in a higher quality way,” he added.
