How smarter meetings can prevent high-tech worker burnout

During the work-from-anywhere upheaval, many employees have complained about the surge of videoconferences. The average number of video meetings has risen this year by a whopping 300%¹ and some workers spend nearly one-third of their day in video meetings². Under these conditions, how are high-tech workers supposed to complete their projects?

No wonder 38% of employees say they’ve experienced video call fatigue this year³. Research shows that video is a timesaver⁴, and many high-tech organizations deem employee “visibility” essential to collaboration and smooth operations, but shouldn’t organizations schedule video meetings more judiciously?

Yes, but there is one catch. Organizations need a reliable communications platform capable of running smarter meetings. That’s the idea that inspired a completely new offering: RingCentral Glip Pro™, a unified communications platform that combines video and messaging and adds innovations aimed at making meetings smarter and more productive for global, high-tech workers.

RingCentral Glip Pro™ features:

• Unlimited duration HD video meetings with up to 100 participants
• Carrier-grade security
• No download to host or join
• Built-in team messaging
• And it’s free

And we’ve introduced an extended offering called Glip Pro+™  that adds smart features such as: analytics; developer/platform API extensions; single sign-on; delegate scheduling; and space for larger meetings with 200 participants and AI-enabled features such as background noise reduction.

Of course, there are other communications challenges that hamper high-tech companies. An IDC study⁵ found that more than half of employees cite difficulty communicating and collaborating with colleagues and external stakeholders as a key business issue. Nearly three in five employees blame inefficient or manual processes for the difficulty communicating inside and outside of the business. And more than two in five claim little or no visibility into obtaining timely status updates or key processes and information.

Getting smarter about meetings

What are the keys to making high-tech team meetings more productive? There are three phases to meetings—and each is ripe for improvement. RingCentral Glip Pro™ is designed to address these concerns:

• Pre-meeting—make meetings easier to launch. Make it easy to switch between mobile devices and computers. Make downloads a thing of the past and share a URL that just works without 30-seconds of load time or having to readjust audio or video settings
• During-meeting—use team messaging to improve group collaboration and reduce everyone’s reliance upon video. Make it just as easy and powerful to participate on a mobile phone as it is on a laptop. Your high-tech team can share documents and discuss them without having to switch on cameras and juggle multiple apps
• Post-meeting—share meeting notes immediately after, which helps reduce team stress

Meeting tech underperforms

From a purely technical standpoint, many other meeting solutions today are unreliable: rife with security vulnerabilities, inadequate audio and video quality, and poor uptime metrics. Depending upon which solutions are in place, high-tech team meetings may be fragmented by the use of multiple apps or disrupted workflows.

Without the right communications and collaboration tools, high-tech organizations may find it difficult to scale their operations—especially with multiple locations and geographies in the mix. Without enterprise-class security and 5-9’s reliability, in a scalable, cloud-based communications platform, organizations will have to cobble together on-premises solutions that cannot adapt to changes in the work-from-anywhere workplace. High-tech teams require communication and collaboration platforms that will continuously grow with their organization—and not remain stuck in 2020.

Preparing for a hybrid future

How can high-tech companies strike a happy balance that enables them to improve employee visibility without holding too many video meetings?

In the first half of 2020, high-tech organizations worried that if they couldn’t monitor their employees, productivity would certainly crumble. But just the opposite happened. The primary factor undermining productivity was endless video meetings. These have become a distraction for workers trying to focus on the often technical tasks at hand.

The solution is providing a full-featured team-messaging platform that can reduce the stress of, and reliance upon, perpetual on-camera time. But do team meetings without video get the job done? Many workers are open to it: 24% confirmed⁶ that they find virtual meetings inefficient and exhausting and prefer to communicate via other channels, like email or phone.

In some sense, 2020 has been a test run for global, high-tech organizations making a forced adjustment to a hybrid work future. Hybrid work is likely to continue throughout 2021 and perhaps indefinitely. Can on-premises communications solutions adapt to those changes? (Spoiler alert: no, they cannot.)

Videoconferencing may remain with us until virtual reality or augmented reality or holograms catch on; meanwhile, team messaging must carry more of the load to avoid meeting fatigue. The new RingCentral Glip Pro™ offering shows high-tech teams how to achieve that balance both gracefully and productively.

Originally published Dec 22, 2020, updated Dec 30, 2022