How Video Conferencing Helps Far-Flung Teams

There’s wisdom in keeping all your employees under one roof. Updates are easy. Meetings can be done in a jiff. And bonding and camaraderie are often the inevitable result of spending days and months together. You tend to develop a closer relationship with anyone who’s shared snacks with you or heard you sing along with music in your cubicle.

So how do you create the same conditions for offsite teams? Here’s how video conferencing comes to the rescue:

On hiring

It’s not always practical to hire local talents especially if the pool is thin and shallow. By expanding your job search to a global scale, you have a bigger talent pool to explore. With more than enough applicants to make for a decent list of options, you won’t have to compromise on your hiring standards and make do with lesser choices. That’s one way to guarantee your team will fail. Because hiring right is essential in building the kind of team and culture you want, especially when you’re trying to put together a remote team. You’ll need to find someone reliable. You can’t risk hiring anyone you can’t trust to get the job done. Bad hires tend to spell gloom for peaceful team dynamics and high productivity right from the get-go. With video solutions, finding the right person for the job is easy and convenient for you.

On staying connected

No need to worry about connection hurdles. A lot of video software and systems out in the market today are so easy to use that getting in touch with your team and staying connected to them throughout the day is no biggie, says the Ingram Micro Advisor. This matters, especially if a lot of people on your team live in different time zones. If there’s anything you need—a quick revision, a missing file or a series of revisions you want to propose or discuss—quick connections are easy via video calls.

On improving connection

When you work at home and spend a great deal of your time alone, it can be hard to develop the team spirit and camaraderie office employees feel after a month or two on the job. That’s because it’s tough to remotely feel anything like trust or friendship for people you only know as addresses in your email contact list. Video calls change that completely. There’s something more intimate and friendly when you can put a face to the name. When you can easily identify a person by face or name, that takes the relationship to another level, one that helps you and your offsite teams work even better. You get to see how they are in real life and that gives you the best ideas on how to connect to them.

On collaboration

A lot of cloud-based video solutions offer a chock full of collaboration-ready features. With video meeting solutions for business from providers like BlueJeans—one of the most well-known authorities in cloud-based video technology—you and your teams don’t have to waste an entire day or two just trying to sort out the revisions for a certain project. No need to keep sending photos of a product in the middle of beta testing. With video clips, it’s easy to show the rest of the group what you’re working on, what changes or revisions you need help with and what kind of results you’ve got. All these contribute to an ideal collaborative environment.

On improving retention

Employees resign for a number of reasons. One of these is poor engagement. If your employee feels like he isn’t contributing anything to the work, that could be a likely reason why he’ll want to put in his resignation. Since remote work isn’t for everyone—you’ve got to find someone disciplined enough to keep up with the deadlines and competent enough to follow instructions and sort out details on his own—losing a good remote employee can be quite the blow. With video calls to replace chats and emails, you can reach out to your remote employees and make them you appreciate them in the best way. The more they feel like they’re making a difference, the less likely they are to resign. So if you want to make sure you keep retention high among your offsite employees, use video to show them how much you value their contribution and the work they do.

On updates

Videos make it easy for you to make real-time announcements and updates about the company and its future. From milestones to current challenges, video calls make it convenient to get everyone on the same page. This makes your offsite teams feel like they’re a valuable a part of the team and keeps them from feeling left out. So you don’t just ensure your teams—both onsite and offsite groups—are always caught up, says the Business 2 Community, you also prevent offsite employees from developing any ill will or negative feelings.

So get remote teams right. Use the right tools to keep your team involved, productive and happy.