Tommy Edlund, 2018-08-20
What is effective collaboration worth?
Is it always true that new collaboration technology make us collaborate more efficiently? Probably not. The problem is that we rarely know exactly which one of the new tools will bring most efficiency to the organization. Let’s take a look and see if we can guide you a bit closer towards the right buying decision.
Many analysts predict that investment in collaboration tools will increase over the coming years. The figures vary, but due to the increasing number of huddle rooms that need to be upgraded with new collaboration endpoints, huddle room meetings will represent around 70 percent of all video conferencing rooms in five years. However, how do we know what to invest in?
If you look around, you will find many different ways of working it all out, so we have tried to structure them into six areas:
1. Cost of investment
This is of course something to take into account. However, as you very well know there is much more to an investment than the price – lifetime upgrades, support, implementation and so on – but we will come back to that.
2. Business benefit
A real key figure that often drives the change in the first place. It is at the same time very hard to put a precise figure on. Anyhow, we must try to quantify it as well as we can. It can be everything from decreasing the number of business trips to higher quality in business relations.
3. Implementation cost
A very important number that often ends up at the very end when you evaluate a new system. We believe that this is a key figure. If the implementation takes a long time or takes a lot of effort from your staff, it really needs to be included in the equation.
4. The environmental aspect
We at Konftel think you should add an environmental aspect to your investment as well. If you can reduce business travel in your company, both the global climate and your employees will benefit from day one. There is also a PR aspect and an employer branding aspect to this one. If you are authentic about the environmental work at your company, you can communicate it broadly and make your colleagues proud of their employer and gain respect among future employees.
5. Internal levels of stress
Another aspect of measuring collaboration is to take into account employee health. If the new technology does not work as it is supposed to, it can have a huge negative impact on your colleagues’ health when the stress levels rise. Read more in our blog post on how the younger generation feel more stressed about new technologies than the elderly do. On the other hand, reliable and easy-to-use technology can make a great impact and make work much quicker and more fluent.
6. Future value of the technology
At last, but not least, we should take into account the future value of the technology. Does the company behind your technology have a history of serving their customers with free updates or is this costly?
Is there one answer or many?
As you can see, investing (or sourcing based on service models, for that matter) is a very complex area with a lot of soft values to put into the equation. However, if you never start calculating, you have nothing to compare with. If it is a fairly straightforward and modest investment, like putting a video conference solution into a couple of huddle rooms, you can pretty easily note that the technology’s costs are not the crucial issue. The big question is the likelihood of success. If nobody starts using the technology, it is not only a bad financial investment – it will also increase the stress level at the company and make the next change in the office harder to implement.
Our focus in all this
This is why we at Konftel have put a great deal of effort into number 3 (implementation costs) and 5 (internal level of stress) in the equation, the areas where we can make the greatest difference today. Our goal is that our conference phones and video solutions should be the easiest on the market to set up and handle.
One Cable Connection - connects PC to audio, video and HDMI-screen
Our mobile app for the conference phones and One Cable Connection in the video solutions is a huge part of that drive – the drive to be sure that our products are being used. A well-used collaboration tool will provide an extraordinarily fast return on investment. If you ask us, it’s a “no-brainer” to make that buying decision.
Read more about our video solutions here and our conference phones here.
