The global response to the health crisis has seen an overnight shift to video conferencing as the cornerstone of day-to-day conversations, not just in business but also education, government, medicine and other settings. Practical, cultural, and technological barriers to adoption were all hastily overcome, as one jurisdiction after another rolled out emergency legislation to mandate home-based working.
As Pexip’s Karl Hantho, President of the Americas, described it, “when people ran out of the office they grabbed their essential tools, including virtual tools, and tried to make them work in new environments. In some cases they worked, in others they didn’t work as well as they should… But everybody did what they could, in order to get the job done.
And as the world looks towards a future in which the collaboration landscape will have changed forever, new strategic decisions will need to be made at every level, about how organisations want to work together and move forward.”
This is the subject of a free webinar from Pexip and Omdia on Tuesday, May 5th, How to enable long-term success with video conferencing, in which the subject of video communications at an organisational level will be explored in depth to support IT leaders and decision makers in formulating strategic plans for the future. As Hantho explained,
“there’s increasing survey research now indicating that some proportion of employees will continue to work from home offices. And other speculation about how meeting rooms will change”
Small flexible spaces had been the trend until so recently, but our post-Covid world will bring new concerns once we start to mingle again. “What about the notion of hot-desking, the idea of coming in and using space and equipment, when you don’t know who’s been there before...? We’re going to need some rapid directional decisions, as part of a measured approach — leadership-driven rather than ad-hoc, for long-term success”.
Planning for a phased transition back to the office will be vital for every organisation, and involve a broad range of considerations from real estate to vendor choice, and where video conferencing strategy sits long term will influence many choices.
