2019-08-27|News
In the era of globalization, business not only interacts with the internal teams, domestic clients and local suppliers, but also build and maintain quality relationships with worldwide partners. Face-to-face communication still plays a big role in creating trust and building strong relationships, however, considering the travel expenses and time spent, it is quite common for people across a range of time zones and areas to join remote meetings with co-workers and customers.
If your company hasn’t embraced video conferences, then you can carefully think about the 5 benefits of video conferencing and decide.
On one hand, globalization allows companies to do business outside of their countries, on the other hand, employment also goes to the world. Regardless of location, companies can hire the best people as they want. Those people can work in the office, or they can work from wherever they please, for example, work from home, coffee shops or co-working space. According to Forbes, remote work has become the standard operating mode for at least 50% of the U.S. population.
One of the most helpful technologies for seamless remote work is videoconferencing. Thanks to advent of videoconferencing, no matter where you are, you can still see and speak to one another in the office in real time and discuss. Video conferencing is a win-win situation. Companies save money of office renting, while out-of-office workers enjoy the freedom to create their own schedules while connecting with their team members.
Many people are big believers in face to face meetings as it creates trust and increases engagement. However, in person meetings are not easy. First, travel expenses are high. If your client is far away from you like thousands of miles away, you have to catch planes, trains, or ships to travel and meet. Secondly, it takes up a lot of time to discuss and arrange the date and place of the meeting for everyone to come together and meet.
When people want the experience of a face-to-face meeting, but can’t geographically connect in conference rooms, video conferencing is a good alternative. It gives you the feeling as good as being there, but it costs less and reduced travel also saves time for everyone. For example, Kandao Meeting, the 360°all-in-one conferencing camera, makes sure everyone is visible and engaged in the meeting with hd video. All participants can comfortably sit in different huddle rooms while communicate as if they were in the same room with the team. The high quality video gives you the feeling of talking face to face in real time.
As business becomes more globalized and distributed, email is a great tool to help us transcend space and time to communicate. Even if we are based in USA, we can share thoughts and ideas with the European colleagues or clients who is located thousands of miles away via emails. Compared with face-to-face meeting, email as a communication tool is fast, cheap, accessible and easily replicated. You can also attach images, documents or videos to the text messages to help clarify your ideas.
However, as email recipients cannot see each other and they make interpretations based on the text message. In this case, misunderstanding or misinterpretation easily occurs without any voice inflection or emotion display in the email. Also, the loss of face-to-face interaction sacrifices the benefits of intimacy and interpersonal connection which can be achieved by video conference.
Communication is all about details. Based on the text message only, you could not imagine how the words are expressed, or more specifically, how the pitch and tone of voice sound like, what the speed and rhythm of the spoken word is, and how about the pauses between those words. In this case, conference call (audio only) works better than text message, but it still involves a lot of guess work in the communication process. When in conference call, you can only hear how the speaker says, but fail to know his facial expressions, gestures, or posture. Thus, it is hard for you to learn the subtle signals or actual meaning of the speaker’s thoughts without the non-verbal elements.
Prof. Albert Mehrabian stressed the importance of nonverbal messages in personal communication, as he said,
The non-verbal elements are particularly important for communicating feelings and attitude, especially when they are incongruent: if words and body language disagree, one tends to believe the body language.
Therefore, compared with conference call, benefit of video conference is obvious. It brings less misunderstanding with visual display in the video calling. People can see you talking and get nonverbal cues. You can make video calls with video conferencing app from mobile device, or use professional video conferencing equipment to start meeting and have screen sharing with members in far-away meeting room. Some enterprise grade video conferencing solution also offers cloud based video alternatives for customers, leading to improved communications. Also, this video and audio solution allows for a much more personal interaction and closer relationship when participants can see and be seen in web conferencing.
Remote working is quite popular nowadays, but this capability wouldn’t be possible without a simple, unified video conferencing solution. With video conferencing equipment like Kandao Meeting or Polycom RealPresence group 500, now you can have meeting anytime anywhere. When a web conferencing is required, no extra software required. Just simply plug and play, it will directly connect to any popular video conferencing software including Skype for business, Cisco WebEx, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and so on. Compatible with your existing conference room systems.
In this way, remote employees can turn the coffee shops or coworking spaces into a meeting room in minutes. Thanks to conferencing solutions, better work life balance also contributes to higher employee retention rate.
More articles:
5 Things to Consider Before Buying a Video Conference Camera
Kandao Introduces AI-based 360° Conference Camera with Auto Focus on Speaker
