It’s no news that employee engagement notably improves productivity in the workplace, which in turn results in better service offering and increased revenue. However, keeping the staff involved and emotionally committed has never been as easy as flicking a switch, and the situation might be even more difficult if your business is fully in a remote mode. Or might not?
Besides being an excellent communication tool for virtual business meetings, video conferencing solutions can also be instrumental in boosting employee engagement. And here’s a four-step formula for success.
Enable advanced meeting management
If virtual meetings become a daily routine in your organization, it’s important to make them as productive as possible. One of the steps in this direction is creating an outcome-oriented agenda for one-to-many and many-to-many collaborations. Such an agenda will help you clearly define meeting roles, thus empowering everyone to feel responsible.
Also, pay particular attention to the day and time when planning these meetings. Namely, deep-thinking sessions with brainstorming should be scheduled during the time the staff is most productive, and some minor discussions can be organized when your employees have not reached the productivity peak yet.
So that video conferencing could increase the focus of every worker, create so-called rules of the road. This will help you regulate each person’s speaking time and prevent anyone from dominating.
Introduce highly collaborative atmosphere
Another way to boost employee engagement during virtual meetings is to make the most of collaboration tools. If you use an off-the-shelf solution, collaborative functionality might be limited, so think building a custom video conferencing system that would correspond to your specific business needs.
Enable screen-sharing, co-browsing, and multimedia exchange capabilities so that your employees could simultaneously work on the same task without a hitch. Virtual whiteboards can also help in this direction, but make sure you use them responsibly — leveraging ML-powered redaction to blur sensitive data, if needed.
To spare valuable workers the need to complete routine tasks like taking meeting notes, raise the ante with intelligent virtual assistants. Such an innovative tool will leverage NLP to accurately recognize what each employee says, process this disparate information, and transform it into value-rich insights.
Ensure faster tech adoption
The higher the adoption rate of the video conferencing solution among your employees is, the easier it’s to incorporate it into your business workflows. So help the staff seamlessly embrace the new tech by providing software onboarding and employee training.
It’s also important to make your solution easy to use. For that purpose, ensure intuitive navigation and advanced search so that any non tech-savvy user could understand how to maximize software value in their daily routine. Optimize your video conferencing system for mobile to empower employees to collaborate even on the go.
Introducing sophisticated functionality like voice-powered interactivity, real-time captioning, or simultaneous translation will also contribute to increased employee engagement. So rest assured your investment in cutting-edge features will pay off.
Organize virtual hang-outs
Besides addressing burning business needs, video conferencing will help you create a reliable atmosphere where employees can also hone their interpersonal skills. Launches and coffee breaks with small talks, virtual birthday celebrations — the possibilities are numerous.
If you want to add a flair of creativity, organize a kind of competition on the best remote work meme or call picture as well as set up your own virtual meeting traditions.
Leverage real-time communication tech to collect employee feedback on using video conferencing, gauge their satisfaction on remote work in general, and address all possible engagement gaps.
On a final note
To maintain the same or even higher level of productivity during the remote work period, you need to keep employees engaged and focused. The task is not easy so use the cutting edge of video conferencing tech for positive outcomes. Besides providing advanced collaboration capabilities, help employees with software adoption and add an informal flair to virtual interactions.
About the author:
Yana Yelina is a Technology Writer at Oxagile, a provider of software engineering and IT consulting services. Her articles have been featured on KDNuggets, ITProPortal, Jaxenter, Singularity Hub, and Datafloq, to name a few. Yana is passionate about the untapped potential of technology and explores the perks it can bring businesses of every stripe. You can reach Yana at [email protected] or connect via LinkedIn or Twitter.
