4 Ways That Video Improves Colleague Relationships

Video communications are taking the business world by storm. Gone are the days of work being an impersonal place, and now are the days of employees being eager to get to work to socialize with peers and work towards an ultimate shared goal. But how exactly can video conference help this happen, and why should you invest in such technologies for your business?

Nurturing Strong Bonds between Employees

Communicating over a phone call or VOIP service is an excellent way to quickly pass on orders or make queries between employees or departments, but this way is impersonal and is often void of any real emotional connection. This can become a problem if your employees need to rely on or trust each other, as trust is developed through real interactions and phone calls or VOIP services don’t always offer this. 

When communicating face-to-face, in comparison, trust is developed at a far more rapid pace, since both parties will be making eye contact, sharing face and body gestures and, ultimately, learning more about each other in the process. This is important because, as CIO agrees, trust will more often than not help your employees work better together, which results in a higher standard of quality in their work. This is the reason why millions, are spent on team building getaways and exercises each year – because intelligent business leaders understand that employees who rely on each other need to be able to trust each other on a personal level to achieve their best.

Improving the Effects of Collaboration Efforts

While many of the basic office problems can be solved by simply communicating via voice and explaining what is wrong or what needs to be done, there are some tasks that require one person to actually demonstrate or show another in order to clearly communicate the problem or task. In such scenarios, video conferencing ensures that all of this can, in fact, be done, and without anyone have to physically travel or bring resources to another employee’s workstation. Instead, one person can simply share the documents, files or other resources directly, and both parties can in fact edit, modify or work on a project together in real time. This not only saves your employees the time and effort spent transporting resources to other workstations – which all adds up to reduce overall productivity – but also ensures less frustration for everyone as they will be able to work from wherever they are while having all the necessary tools and resources at their disposal. 

Building Emotional Connections with the Familiarity Principle

While the familiarity principle has been used in advertising and marketing techniques for many years now, as seen in a recent article by Wistia, to connect with consumers and form loyal emotional bonds, many entrepreneurs and business leaders have recently adopted the idea to promote trust between employees. As humans, we grow accustomed to and eventually choose a preference of whatever we come into contact with most often – unless of course, that thing results in pain or other negative emotions. This is why cereal brands utilize mascots and is also why most leading brands are so specific about how their brands are represented. This is called the familiarity effect, which is far more powerful as more stimuli are added. A personal conversation each morning, for example, would be far more effective in this regard than a rung bell or other impersonal communication. So start utilizing this technique and get your employees more familiar, as well as comfortable, with each other with video meeting services for IT and other teams, so as to nurture genuine trust between your employees and encourage them all to invest more of their time and energy into the shared success of your organization and its stakeholders.

Eliminating the Typical Autopilot Responses

When on a conference call with many people, it’s easy to slip into the background and continue with your work or catch up on social media if you aren’t a highly valuable member of the discussion. Even on a one-on-one phone call, you may be persuaded to stop giving your full attention and simply offer automatic replies that you know aren’t wrong – even if they don’t add value to the conversation. Video conferencing, however, demands the full attention of all attendees, since it is far easier to identify when someone isn’t paying attention when you are able to see their face. As such, when speaking face-to-face online, the answers each attendee will give may be far more valuable, as they will be more inclined to stay focused, participate and keep track of what’s being discussed.

While some see video conferencing simply as a more expensive way to communicate, the truth is that communicating face-to-face offers many advantages for business. From building trust between employees to empowering them with more tools and capabilities, there are actually few investments more worthwhile than video communications services.