Video conferencing software has shot up in popularity ever since the lockdowns of 2020.
But while people use it on a daily basis to talk to friends and family, there is much untapped potential in the realm of video conferencing. In a business setting, video conferencing can redefine the way you deal with travel, scheduling, technical difficulties, and more.
And with remote work becoming more frequent – and becoming mandatory in many places – video conferencing can have a significant impact on productivity by giving your remote teams the opportunity to communicate in a natural way, even from a distance.
Big or small, any business will quickly see the difference video conferencing can make.
Video conferencing software can be used for far more than just meetings. Here are 10 of the biggest ways it can benefit your business.
Meetings can be expensive to set up, especially if you don’t have a dedicated meeting room within your offices. Renting a meeting space can be expensive, and even if you have a room at your disposal, the cost of refreshments, seating, devices, and other necessities will add up.
In a video conference, there’s no need for any of that. The only thing anyone needs is a phone or computer with a camera, so costs are near zero!
Whether you’re taking a bus, train, or personal vehicle to get to a meeting, being on the road takes precious time out of your day. What if you could use that time elsewhere, to get even more done – or just to relax?
Video conferences can be created and joined from anywhere with just the click of a button. Cutting transit out of the equation entirely can save you literally hours every week.
More than 70% of our daily communication is non-verbal, conveyed mostly via tone and body language.
This means that a large portion of the information we’d normally convey in a conversation is lost when we talk over the phone – where body language is absent – and even more is lost when we send an email – where we can’t communicate tone or body language.
Video conferences allow for just as much non-verbal interaction as an in-person meeting, so no information is lost. Seeing your team face-to-face allows for better connections, easier communication of ideas, and is overall a more natural form of interaction.
Screen sharing is one of the most useful features that comes with video conferencing software. When you’re in a call, you can press a button and anyone in the call can see whatever is on your screen.
This is particularly useful for company presentations. Whether it be photos, text, video, graphics, or more, anything that can appear on your computer screen can be shared with the whole group in real time.
People can comment and discuss the material, and the meeting can run just as smoothly as an in-person one – if not even better!
Breakout rooms are a super-useful feature if your business runs multiple departments or your teams work in smaller groups.
When you’re in a video meeting with multiple people, you have the option to create any number of breakout rooms – which are sub-meetings with fewer people – and send them out to discuss. You can bring all the breakout rooms together again at any time and reconvene the meeting.
Breakout rooms are a quick and easy way to discuss topics in a smaller group without the hassle of creating an entirely new meeting.
For those employees that have been working from home for weeks or months on end, it’s easy to lose motivation and get discouraged by the lack of human contact. Emails are a great way to communicate – but they don’t offer a human touch. Isolation can put a massive damper on productivity.
Video conferencing, while not a complete substitution for in-person contact, can give your remote teams a chance to reconnect in a personal and natural way – and invigorate them to work at their best!
When working remotely, getting help on an issue isn’t as simple as calling a coworker over from the next desk to check out your screen. Even if you send emails back-and-forth or talk over the phone, it’s a lot harder to find and address the problem at hand.
With screen sharing, a co-worker or manager can quickly jump into a video call, see exactly what the problem is in real-time, and give proper advice. Within the span of minutes, your issue can be fixed!
Have you ever spaced out during a meeting and missed a key point that the speaker was making? Unfortunately, you can’t rewind an in-person meeting, but recording is a built-in feature for our video conferencing software.
Go over the recording to catch anything you may have missed, or send the video to a co-worker who wasn’t able to attend. You can even do some fine-tuning to your meeting process by rewatching the meeting with the whole team via screen share and pointing out things that can be improved!
Video conferencing not only saves you time, money, and effort, but your employees as well. With more time to work on important tasks, and less difficulty in addressing minor issues, employee satisfaction will increase drastically.
Bringing all of the points in this post together, bringing video conferencing into your business’ daily activities can cause your productivity and workplace morale to skyrocket.
From saving time and money to improving team connections, it’s clear to see just how useful and multi-faceted this one tool can be.
If you’d like to learn more about our video conferencing solution, as well as the other virtual tools we offer, get in touch with a UnitedCloud specialist today!
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