Even before the pandemic of 2020, about 8.2 million Americans were working at home. The arrival of COVID-19 simply accelerated a trend that was already in motion, pushing more of us to abandon the traditional office format.
The arrival of remote, hybrid, and flexible working brought various benefits to team members, including reduced commute times, better engagement, and even enhanced productivity. At the same time, business leaders got to benefit from lower overheads and a more satisfied team. Now that everyone is aware of how beneficial remote working can be, it’s unlikely we’ll ever return to the way things were.
Of course, for the new age of work to be effective, we need the right tools in place. Video conferencing has become a must-have component of true collaboration. Through video, companies can once again mimic the face-to-face interactions that human beings need.
However, there’s more than one kind of video meeting.
Discovering the Benefits of Video Meetings
Video conferencing has been around for some time now, often in the form of huddle rooms, large video “Rooms”, and other solutions. Today, we’re entering a world where video is a little more flexible. People can join meetings from any webcam or smartphone. Conversations happen in seconds, with the click of a button, and there are no complex set-ups required.
While video meetings are becoming more accessible, there are some challenges that still need to be addressed. Companies in the VCaaS environment are still trying to find a way to replicate the benefits of face-to-face human interaction, through a screen.
The original solution for a lot of companies was grid-style video environments, where employees were arranged onto a screen so that teams could see everyone at once. These grid landscapes gradually increased in size, offering more opportunities for bigger meetings. Alongside that increase, we also got new features, like “spotlight” modes, where we could choose which video streams to focus on.
Companies in the collaboration space started rolling out new ways to enhance the meeting environment and make it more engaging. There are tools that allow you to drag and drop video feeds wherever you want them on your screen. Teams can access tools for virtual backgrounds and noise cancellation, making external distractions less problematic.
What’s more, many of the leading VCaaS offerings on the market come with a variety of tools to make life easier for collaborators in the remote world. You can share files and screens in the middle of a video conferencing or create a presentation for your employees.
But is it enough?
Designing More Immersive Meeting Environments
As we quickly discovered in an age of video-first communications, video conversations just aren’t the same as in-person interactions. The communication strategies that work well in a conference room don’t always translate seamlessly into the quadrants on a computer screen.
According to Microsoft, one of the leaders in the UCaaS and collaboration environment today, a new style of meeting is necessary if companies want to replicate in-person interactions. Video calls in the standard grid format come with a huge cognitive strain, forcing us to pay attention to multiple images at once. What’s more, we’re constantly looking at our own face somewhere in the grid experience too, which makes it harder to focus on what other people are doing and saying.
The standard video conferencing experience quickly created a new problem for meetings. “Zoom fatigue”, or video conferencing fatigue meant that team members started to feel overwhelmed and drained by constant meetings. People felt exhausted by the stress of having to constantly connect to their grid-style meetings.
