It’s hard enough to manage a team, but running remote teams is an entirely different ballgame. Here’s how picking the right video meeting tools can help you manage your team with better, more efficient results:
Eliminate Travel
Video, first and foremost, removes the need for travel. That has a number of possibilities. Just calculate the hours that people spend on commuting to and from work alone. Add the hours you waste on travel just to meet up with clients. By introducing online video meetings to the equation, you won’t have to waste so much time and energy on unnecessary travel, says IT ProPortal.
Reduce Risks
Travel comes with a ton of risks. Road accidents, commuting issues and other problems can inevitably happen. By integrating video meetings into your daily schedule, you could let your employees work from home. After all, with the anywhere access video solutions offer, it won’t matter if your employees report to work from their couch or the corner café. That helps keep travel risks to a minimum and is one way to keep your employees safe.
Encourage BYOD
These days, people are more connected to their laptops and mobile phones. You could encourage bring-your-own-devices to work and save up on office equipment costs. Given the options available in the market, you’ll have an easy time finding one that you can deploy with the least amount of training and IT assistance possible. Sound options include the BlueJeans cloud video conferencing software.
Faster Meetings
Need to discuss changes for a project? Back and forth discussions through email usually end up with a long, unmanageable thread. It’s hard to keep track of details, let alone changes. Compare that to the ease and convenience of video calls. Explanations go that much faster with video. You won’t have to lose sleep about phrasing that sentence right or fixing your word choice, worried that your email might send out the wrong impression.
The face-to-face interaction available through video meetings means that your offsite employees can see your expressions, body language, gestures and get better understanding of what you mean. With video, communications just aren’t faster, they also reduce the risk of misunderstandings. Since misunderstandings can lead to costly delays as well as tension and conflict that could sap team productivity, it’s in your best interests to use tools that eliminate these from the workplace as much as possible.
Speedy Feedback
Imagine having to describe the kind of changes or revisions you want for a project? It takes moments to write out a single word than to say it. By talking about those changes through video meetings, instead of relying on email and chat exchanges, geographically dispersed teams can easily discuss points, necessary revisions and go forward with adjustments. Feedback can be sent and delivered that much faster so project deadlines and timelines can proceed without a hitch.
Boost Engagement
People demonstrate greater engagement with video calls than email, chats or texts. That’s because the nature of video calls makes it harder for people to conceal their disinterest. After all, it’s not easy to hide the fact that you’re just browsing through your Facebook feed, sending a text or playing a game on your laptop when you’re on a video conference than it is when you’re on a call, answering an email or on chat. By using video calls, you can improve engagement levels for your remote teams.
Better Collaboration
One of the best things about cloud video solutions is that the technology makes collaboration, especially among remote teams, so much simpler, says Tech Radar. Working together on projects is no longer insurmountable. You can share images, documents, video and other types of content with everyone on a video call. Need to review a portion of that file?
It’s easy to take control of the camera and zoom in on a specific page so you can point out areas that need revisions to everyone. It’s fast and easy, presenting little to zero hiccups to offsite teams that need to work together to beat those deadlines. Using tools like visually appealing PowerPoint Templates can help to create impactful remote presentations and enhance overall team collaboration.
Connect with Everyone
One of the primary problems you run into when you manage remote staff is the problem of employee disengagement. The distance traditionally meant that remote employees were always the last to know about company updates and announcements. That could breed the kind of workplace culture where people feel a disconnected and disenchanted with their onsite teams and company.
Video conferencing, though, has changed all that. By making it easy to reach out and connect to remote staff, video meetings have now made it possible for companies to make announcements company-wide, which includes remote teams in on the call, so everyone hears those updates and announcements at the same time. It won’t take a lot to make sure everyone’s always on the same page.
If you’re running remote teams, you should seriously consider using cloud video solutions for your organization.