Video Conferencing Solutions can Enhance Your Organization's Collaboration

If your business is like many others, you’ve delayed some of your more capital-intensive plans and focused on efficiency. Since things are starting to reopen in many places, it’s been made clear that keeping your business running with remote workers is a solid strategy, but you can’t keep your projects on the back burner forever. Utilizing video conferencing solutions to help run your projects can be a good stopgap that can give your organization some flexibility. 

Restarting Projects

While your employees were doing DIY home improvement projects, your business’ improvement projects have laid dormant. As the new normal will present situations that were not only rare a short time ago, they are not completely aimed at improving your business’ situation in the same manner as the projects you had planned before this whole thing hit. You will have to be cautious to not put your employees in harm's way. With a projected second wave of COVID-19 still very possible, it’s going to be imperative for project teams to forge ahead even if they are being forced to work from remote locations. 

One of the best collaboration tools you have at this point is your video conferencing solution. Not only does it provide your team the ability to meet with each other from remote locations, modern solutions are built with the ability to integrate some of your most critical software into the meetings. These integrations can go a long way toward giving your project team members the resources they need to efficiently and effectively complete difficult projects. 

Collaboration Strategies

Alas, solid collaboration isn’t just the act of people working together. True collaboration is measured in the successful delivery of professional goods and services. If your project teams need to work together to get your offerings out the door, and they are being forced to work remotely, invest in a video conferencing solution that provides both an option-rich interface with the ability to interact as a team or one-on-one. This is important because the more time you spend in meetings, the less time is spent being actually productive, even if the meetings contents are imperative to the success of the project. 

Once you have a reliable conferencing solution in place, you can use it to run point over operational difficulties, projects, and even whole staff meetings. Here are some suggestions on how to utilize your video conferencing solution to get the most out of your team. 

1. Don’t be quick to save time - Many people will try to keep meetings as brief as possible. That’s actually a good practice, but if your team needs communication on the specifics of a project or task, brevity may be counterproductive.
2. Don’t send too many messages - Do you follow up using instant message, email and phone? This is completely overkill. With a video conferencing platform, you can quickly address all the issues present for that day at once, not over multiple forms of communication. If things do require a write up after the fact, assign one person to compose meeting minutes.
3. Don’t just use the video conference for work - Part of working for a company is the camaraderie your staff shares. Things like birthday parties and staff meetings can be a respite from the continual flow of work-related information.

Utilizing video conferencing for collaboration means having a strategy that both keeps people connected while limiting the feeling of anxiety that comes from being overwhelmed with information. If you would like to talk about video conferencing solutions that can help your business get the most out of your remote staff, call the IT experts at Macro Systems today at 703-359-9211.