Designing a Telepresence Strategy for Your Business

Video conferencing and telepresence is a strategic opportunity. Designing a telepresence strategy for your business can offer much more than just deploying video conference equipment. A strategic approach means you can tackle improvements in communication and decision making through your video conference deployment.

Goals to Consider for Your Telepresence Strategy

1. Video Conferencing and Unified Communication Initiatives

As the modern workforce is increasingly distributed and mobile, organizations are struggling to maintain connections. This struggle is driving unified communication initiatives to support collaboration and decision making. The ability of telepresence to extend personal experiences across the organization makes it a key component of your UC strategy.

2. Faster Decision Making

In a globally competitive market, managers are increasingly facing decisions with broad implications and multiple shared dependencies with other managers.  Pulling together the right resources to make decisions is becoming increasingly difficult. Video conferencing reduces decision cycle times by bringing the right people face to face quickly with the convenience of the telephone and without the logistics and costs of travel.

3. Increased Information Retention Means the Message Gets Through

People remember more from a video conference call because it is an interactive human experience. In a comparison between video and telephone, video is an obvious winner. Seeing a person creates a connection that is easier for the listener to focus on. Also, seeing the person’s emotion and other non-verbal cues conveys more of the message than a voice on a phone.

More people can attend the meeting because of the elimination of travel costs, which allows the source of an idea to speak directly to the team.  Fewer intermediaries transmitting the message means the meaning gets through.

4. Improved Relationships

It is easier to build a personal relationship with someone you see regularly, versus someone you just hear on a telephone. A face to face interaction provides more to ground the relationship on. Video conferencing allows for better communication because you can see the impact your words are having on the other person, or see their emotions in what they are saying.  Extending this connection through video conferencing will help forge the personal relationships that drive business success.

5. Greater Meeting Effectiveness

Faster decisions, better information retention, and improved personal relationships all combine to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your meetings. Video conferencing and telepresence make it easier to pull efficient meetings together quickly and communicate effectively.

6. Collaboration

a. Easier Internally

Today’s work environment is complex. There is increasing specialization and co-dependence. Cross functional teams are the norm, and team members are constantly on the move. Companies with distributed teams of internal and external resources struggle with the best way to share ideas and information. Video conferencing creates the opportunity to make in-person telepresence connections within the team from anywhere, anytime.  If collaboration is a key source of competitive advantage in your organization, video conferencing and telepresence is an essential strategy to make collaboration happen.

b. Better Externally

For many organizations competitive advantage is also found through collaborating with external partners and customers. Video conferencing can extend all of the meeting effectiveness advantages of telepresence into these relationships too.  The ability to connect face to face anywhere, anytime, will profoundly change the intimacy and opportunities of these external collaborations.

Conclusion

Video conferencing and telepresence is a strategic opportunity, it will change how your organization communicates and makes decisions. However, none of this will happen if you deploy a video conference system that nobody uses.

It seems obvious but the most important thing about deploying a video conferencing system is that it’s easy to use, works every time and support is available immediately when needed. When designing a telepresence strategy for your business it is important to begin with the participants in mind and make sure they will use the video conference equipment and adopt this communication style into their work.  Without user adoption equipment sits in a corner gathering dust and the business goals are not achieved.

Telemerge will work with you to build a plan that delivers a telepresence experience participants love and come back to again and again. With this plan video conferencing and telepresence can help your organization be nimble and fast in the face of global market pressures.

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