December 1, 2017
Efficiency is everything in business. The faster you can accomplish a task, the more tasks you can accomplish in a day. The more your individual employees accomplish, the more your business achieves. It is the entire reason the computer replaced the typewriter and the phone replaced the telegraph. The pursuit of efficiency has never changed. We just focus on different areas.
Today, the primary battleground of efficiency isn’t communicating over distances, it’s coordinating among team members. Whether across the country or across the conference room, a business meeting can either be time well spent or time wasted. Collaborating technology today is working hard to ensure every meeting is the former and not the latter.
Some Meeting Stats
How inefficient can meetings really be? According to the National Statistics Council, 37% of the average knowledge worker’s time is spent in meetings. With that in mind, a third of an employee’s salary is earned by what occurs during these meetings.
Now, collaboration technology is essential to helping these meetings run smoothly. If the team is divided among several locations, a teleconference solution will prove its value a hundred times over. Yet, these solutions do not come without their drawbacks. Ovum states that the average delay in a meeting’s start time is over 10 minutes. That’s ten minutes wasted every meeting, every time.
Furthermore, Interaction Associates states that 70% of workers admit to multi-tasking during meetings. Though this may sound like a productive worker, it also shows that meetings themselves are not engaging or valuable enough to hold most worker’s full attention.
Clearly, the average business meeting is not as efficient as it could be. There is an opportunity here to improve and gain an edge.
Meeting Pain Points
Every meeting has four stages: scheduling, joining, managing, and participating. At each of these stages is an opportunity for confusion, indecision, and wasted time. Here are a few of the pain points for each stage.
Scheduling: The scheduling pain points mostly come from coordinating between multiple forms of technology and the needs of your coworkers.
- Multiple disconnected scheduling apps
- Confusing information on how to join meetings
- Scheduling video units
Joining: Managing the technology required to host a meeting for remote employees can be a challenge. Sometimes your coworkers struggle to navigate the interface to join the meetings or the video units themselves struggle in some way.
- Dial in numbers
- Uncooperative video units
Managing: During the meeting itself, the wrong collaboration solution might be difficult to navigate or remote employees might be interrupted by mischievous children, pets, or even the train in the background.
- Background noise
- Meeting controls
Participating: When discussing complicated topics, visual aids often become necessary. Without the ability to share screens, share files, or otherwise transmit necessary documents, fumbling between your email and the meeting is a huge time waster.
- Sharing files, data, and information
- Inadequate mobile experience
A Solution Unique to Your Business
There are no out-of-the box solutions to completely fix your collaboration strategy. Like many technologies, how you use collaboration technologies is just as important as using them at all. For that reason, Mindsight offers a collaboration roadmap. Our consultants will take time to learn your business process and develop a catered strategy to deploy and adopt the right collaboration solution for your unique business needs.
Learn more about our Collaboration Roadmap in our brochure.
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About Mindsight
Mindsight, a Chicago IT services provider, is an extension of your team. Our culture is built on transparency and trust, and our team is made up of extraordinary people – the kinds of people you would hire. We have one of the largest expert-level engineering teams delivering the full spectrum of IT services and solutions, from cloud to infrastructure, collaboration to contact center. Our highly-certified engineers and process-oriented excellence have certainly been key to our success. But what really sets us apart is our straightforward and honest approach to every conversation, whether it is for an emerging business or global enterprise. Our customers rely on our thought leadership, responsiveness, and dedication to solving their toughest technology challenges.
Contact us at GoMindsight.com.