Collaborate Better for More Successful Workflow

If your business is like many others, you’ve pushed off some of your more capital-intensive plans and focused on efficiency. Now that things are starting to reopen in many places, it’s been made clear that keeping your business running with remote workers is a good strategy, but you can’t keep your projects on the back burner forever. Using video conferencing solutions to help run your projects can be a good stopgap that can give your business some flexibility. Let’s take a look. 

Restarting Projects

While your employees were doing DIY home improvement projects, your business’ improvement projects have laid dormant. As the new normal will present situations that were not only rare a short time ago, they are not completely aimed at improving your business’ situation in the same manner as the projects you had planned before this whole thing hit. If your strategy is like many other businesses, you will have to be cautious to not put your employees in harm's way. With a projected second wave of COVID-19 still possible, it’s going to be important for project teams to forge ahead even if they are being forced to work from remote locations. 

One of the best collaboration tools you have at this point is your video conferencing solution. Not only does it give your team the ability to meet with each other from remote locations, solutions today are built with the ability to integrate some of your most important software into the meetings. These integrations can go a long way toward giving your project team members the resources they need to efficiently and effectively complete difficult projects. 

Collaboration Strategies

Sad to say, solid collaboration isn’t just the act of people working together. True collaboration is measured in the successful delivery of professional goods and services. If your project teams need to work together to get your offerings out the door, and they are being forced to work remotely, invest in a video conferencing solution that provides both an option-rich interface with the ability to interact as a team or one-on-one. This is crucial because the more time you spend in meetings, the less time is spent being actually productive, even if the meetings contents are critical to the success of the project. 

Once you have a reliable conferencing solution in place, you can use it to run point over operational difficulties, projects, and even whole staff meetings. Here are some suggestions on how to use your video conferencing solution to get the most out of your team. 

1. Don’t be brief to save time - Many people will try to keep meetings as short as possible. That’s actually a good practice, but if your team needs communication on the specifics of a project or task, brevity may be counterproductive.
2. Don’t send too many messages - Do you follow up using instant message, email and phone? This is completely overkill. With a video conferencing platform, you can quickly address all the issues present for that day at once, not over multiple forms of communication. If things do require a write up after the fact, assign one person to compose meeting minutes.
3. Don’t just use the video conference for work - Part of working for a company is the camaraderie your staff shares. Things like birthday parties and staff meetings can be a respite from the continual flow of work-related information.

Using video conferencing for collaboration means having a strategy that both keeps people connected while reducing the feeling of anxiety that comes from being overwhelmed with information. If you would like to talk about video conferencing solutions that can help your business get the most out of your remote staff, call the IT experts at Directive today at 607.433.2200.