Michael is a sales representative of a mid-sized tech company that exports cloud storage solutions to businesses around the country. This year, his company implemented a video conferencing system to improve communications in the company beyond the team messaging and email system they’ve been using for years.
A marketing operations team from another company wants to know more about Michael’s product, so he offers to give them a walkthrough. He sends several members of their team a video meeting invitation, which directs them to a download page for the video meeting app. After downloading, every member has to sign up for an account, configure their audio settings, and input meeting IDs.
When Michael joins the call, only one other person is there. The rest are still going through the tedious process it takes to get Michael’s video meeting set up. By the time everyone joins, the meeting is several minutes behind schedule, and impressions of Michael’s company have gone south.
Slow technology causes meetings to delay and attendees to lose focus
Sadly, video conferencing hurdles are more common than we’d like to think, and those hurdles prevent productive meetings from happening. When every video conference with clients and colleagues takes several minutes just to set up, meetings start late and time gets wasted. Chances are you’ve walked into an in-person meeting that didn’t start on time. The on-time participants start chatting about tangential projects or their travel plans for the weekend, while others sink into their laptops and work on unrelated tasks.
Employees’ schedules are so stacked with assignments and requests that meetings are often the last place they want to be. In fact, up to 30% of every meeting is considered unproductive, with 67% of workers saying meetings distract them from their jobs. Meetings that start late contribute to this time sink, which translates to money down the drain.
The same principle is especially true for video meetings, where there’s less accountability for people to stay focused. When video meetings get delayed, employees aren’t subject to the same scrutiny as when they sit next to colleagues in a meeting room. They’re either Alt-Tabbed—looking at other windows and tabs waiting for the meeting to start—or having “how-was-your-weekend” small talk with other participants.
Video meetings without context cause employees to fall behind
It’s not uncommon for employees to be so inundated with other tasks and meetings that they go into video meetings blind. Remote workers don’t have in-person interactions with colleagues to keep them reminded of certain projects. When it’s time to join a meeting, they either have to spend time digging through old conversations and emails or use context clues in the meeting to get up to speed.
While the meetings themselves won’t get delayed, participants who don’t have easy access to context can get quickly left behind. Consider that every meeting can have multiple participants who are contextually lost, these meetings are downhill slopes of unproductiveness for everyone, and unproductive meetings cost US business $37 billion every year.
Removing video meeting barriers is essential to minimizing delays
Meetings need to start on time to be productive, and that begins with breaking down the barriers around video meetings. Quick and effortless video meeting technology is key to making it happen.
- Barrier #1: Joining video meetings shouldn’t require employees and clients to set up login credentials or search their messages and emails for meeting IDs. The longer it takes to join, the poorer the meeting experience.
- Barrier #2: Video meetings should provide context so that when meetings start, participants can instantly access the information they need to catch up and jump straight into the conversation.
Drive productive meetings with a unified communications app for messaging, video, and phone
An effective video meeting solution allows employees to launch or join meetings with just the click of a button, such as browser-based solutions. Meetings are hosted in a browser where employees and clients can connect without any downloads or registrations needed. All it takes is an invitation link to hop in. At the same time, users don’t have to worry about compatibility issues with different operating systems and setups.
| Tip: Make sure your browser-based solution offers the same functionality (screen sharing, recording, annotations) as app-based solutions. |
Employees need context too, and that’s where a unified app comes in. Video meetings should live side-by-side with team messaging apps—preferably in the same window—so when attendees join a meeting, they have instant access to conversation histories, files, and links. A single application for messaging, video, and phone means there’s no need to search through multiple communications apps to gather information.
Once video meetings can be launched effortlessly and employees are fully equipped to dive into conversations with context, meetings can start on time, stay productive, and ensure a positive meeting experience for everyone.
See what a unified communications solution with built-in browser-based video meetings can do for you. Check out a clip of RingCentral Video below, and click here to request a demo today.
Originally published Apr 23, 2020, updated Jan 18, 2023