The modern workplace is changing.
More often than not, teams aren't necessarily located in the same office anymore. Your team members may not even be in the same country as you. Yet, this doesn’t change the fact that 75% of employers consider teamwork and collaboration to be crucial to business success.
People are at the heart of any thriving business. If your people can't work together effectively to overcome challenges and get things done, then they'll spend all their time struggling to understand their tasks at work, rather than accomplishing real results. The good news is that communication leads like Cisco have a strategy for overcoming this problem. It's called cognitive collaboration.
Cognitive collaboration is a solution that combines people insights, artificial intelligence, relationship intelligence, and business processes to establish better teamwork and eliminate workplace silos. Here's your guide to one of the major components of cognitive collaboration: People Insights.
What is People Insights?
"People Insights" is one of the most recent features announced by Cisco as part of their upgrade to the Webex experience. With this solution, Cisco hopes to help businesses foster better relationships between their employees, stronger collaboration, and enhanced engagement.
The soul of People Insights is the idea that contextually relevant, rich, and useful information can make conversations more effective. Cisco believes that when you're working with other people on essential projects, it helps to know who those people are. Accessing details about that person's background, their knowledge, and what they've achieved already can strengthen the way that people relate to their colleagues, as well as external contractors.
Intrado has built a robust platform of end-to-end communication and collaboration solutions for today's businesses within the Cisco environment. Using the latest developments in artificial intelligence and tools like People Insights, Intrado can help companies of all sizes to create a more immersive and contextual collaboration experience.
People Insights is a tool built on the idea that successful collaboration hinges on the quality of the relationships that people have with their teams. However, often, building relationships takes time, particularly when individuals don't know much about the people that they're communicating with. Context is the catalyst for synergy in the workplace. People Insights delivers that context in a way that's rich, immersive, and up-to-date. It helps with overcoming issues like:
- Get-to-know-you meetings: These roundtable sessions were often complicated, embarrassing and nerve-wracking. People never knew how much to reveal about themselves, and often, the experience ended up being awkward rather than insightful
- Searching through social profiles online: You're not always guaranteed to get useful insights from the social media profiles that people keep online. There's still a risk that these resources will be out of date
- Googling information: Googling a person is a tricky process. There are plenty of people out there with the same name. You're never totally sure whether the information that you're collecting is on the right person
As Intrado notes, "In today's workplace, it's crucial for businesses to understand how people work. In both external and internal conversations, tools like People Insights can bring more relevant information to the conversation, and strengthen the relationships that businesses build."
Overcoming Common Team Building Challenges
In a world where teams and the way that they work together is more essential than ever, People Insights is crucial. This technology offers an answer to the team-building challenges that have failed to deliver deep connections in the past. Cisco believes that up until now, the strategies that we've used to bring context to conversations have been cumbersome and impractical. More often than not, they take focus and attention away from the meeting, rather than improving the conversation.
For years, companies like Intrado have presented Cisco solutions as basic conferencing tools that help to keep people connected. However, with offerings like People Insights, there's a new opportunity to strengthen the quality of each connection between the people in your teams and the individuals that they talk to. Cisco introduced People Insights by leveraging its expertise as a technology company, it's AI insights, and its computing power, all blended with the new acquisition of Accompany. The Accompany app set the standard for collecting and consolidating useful information about meeting participants, inspiring a new age of conferencing for the Cisco landscape.
With People Insights, users in the modern collaboration space can quickly and easily access a profile tab that reveals the right kind of information that they need about each person. When working on a team project for instance, users can access immediate information about the people that they're connecting with, so they know exactly who to message at the right time. For instance, a user looking for someone with a speciality in security and data management can look for those features in the People Insights tab of their group.
Additionally, because the People Insights solution is constantly updating, team members have a way to keep track of the new skills that their colleagues have, and the ice-breaking news stories they might be able to talk about at the beginning of their next meeting. Users can add information to their profiles like:
