Tommy Edlund, 2021-02-10
Be More Than Dressed For Success
The traditional daily office commute has changed forever, replaced by more hybrid ways of working – where it’s not just the way people dress that determines their success.
Pre-pandemic, some surveys suggest just five per cent of workforces were based from home. Now it is set to rise exponentially with almost 80 percent wishing to work remotely in some capacity. More than half of companies are planning to increase collaboration spend, with healthcare and education two of the hottest sectors just now. More than a third will increase meeting rooms investment. Furthermore it is estimated it will take three years for business travel to reach previous levels, if at all.
The world of work has changed forever and that means businesses best-placed to adapt, are the ones where the quality of audiovisual communication is a top priority. The workplace really is now a hybrid one in the truest sense. For many it will be part work from home, part come into the office.
High-quality, sustainable audio and video conferencing is at the centre of this new operating model – where choosing the right equipment for the right location is crucial. It’s about ensuring call quality is uniform across the board, regardless of where a user is physically located.
Quality Counts
Once, video and conference calling was something we did as a last resort, now even the most business-critical meetings are conducted in that way. That’s why quality is so important. People are spending longer in video meetings than they ever did pre-pandemic, so user experience is also right up there with quality, whether people are in their home, at the office - or working in vertical sectors such as education and healthcare.
You really notice if you’re in a virtual meeting and a participant’s audio and video quality pops. It used to be a suit or a handbag or a watch that impressed in a physical meeting room, now it’s the sharpness and clarity of a video feed. And if you’re sharp and clear, your presentation or your negotiation or whatever it is you’re doing in that meeting is 100 percent more impactful. If you’re choppy, then your contribution is undermined. And we’re way past the days when we can get away with blaming that on working from home.
Corporate Currency
In the early days, many businesses didn’t invest in high-quality kit. Now they see audio and video quality as a differentiator so they are playing catch-up. Key hires are weighing up job offers based on the quality of the audio-video kit they will be given to use. And that really is a sign that the hybrid model is here for good.
Where we work has become an irrelevance – it’s what we look and sound like on-screen, that’s the new corporate currency.
