Boost collaboration in between your “Most Important Meetings”

Part II: Moving the needle of collaboration in your organization

In the first part of this blog, I talked about the “Most Important Meeting” and how you can:

  1. Incrementally improve the meeting by taking small steps to collaborate better – some incremental things are foolproof and cost nothing
  2. Make a bigger change by adding something that you aren’t doing today.  Don’t be afraid of bigger steps – the benefits certainly outweigh the costs.
  3. Plan to learn from every step you take

Those activities were collectively the first step to better collaboration in your department or business.

If we dial back the time machine a little, the majority of “Most Important Meetings” which had remote participants were audio conference calls.

When conferencing tools like WebEx, and GoToMeeting came to market, meeting participants from different locations were able to share content parallel to the audio conference.  These conferencing tools have continued to evolve by adding voice (instead of a parallel call) as well as video and some interactive annotation. They have allowed the “Most Important Meeting” to evolve from a “voice only” conference, to a “voice + content + video + annotation” meeting.

The increased conferencing technologies capability leads to a richer meeting experience for all participants – see this blog for more on increasing the richness of experience.

But I also stated that, even though it is important to have better collaboration in your “Most Important Meeting,” you can increase collaboration much more significantly by injecting a higher level of collaboration into the team activities that happen in between the “Most Important Meetings”.

Step 2: Team activities between the most important meetings

A lot more time and work effort is spent in between “Most Important Meetings” than having “Most Important Meetings”.  So it stands to reason that if you can enable greater collaboration during the interaction between your team members for the work they do between meetings, you will be significantly accelerating collaboration in your organization.

Going from a collaborative crawl to a walk – remember the Crawl-Walk-Run (C-W-R) analogy from the last blog.

But, WebEx or GoToMeeting, as good as they are for meetings, are not the ideal tools for day-to-day collaboration between team members.

Why not?

Because they are tools that are designed for meetings. That is the strength of these tools – to facilitate meetings.  All different kinds of meetings in WebEx’s case.

Meeting tools are:

To move collaboration to the day-to-day interactions of your team members, you need to move from tools that are designed for meetings, to tools that are designed for ad hoc collaboration, i.e. Unified Communication (UC) tools.

GoToMeeting and WebEx don’t allow for ad hoc collaboration.  They don’t have Presence, IM (Instant Messaging – outside of the chat function they enable in a meeting) or ad hoc voice or video calling.   WebEx/GoToMeeting technology is designed for a meeting, not as a communication platform that supports day-to-day business.

A good UC platform like Jabber or Lync incorporates technology within it to facilitate meetings.  It is one platform for all the real-time collaboration done within the organization. UC is the central piece of any Corporate Communications Framework, but if you are trying to move from a collaborative Crawl to a Walk, then don’t let the architecting of a framework slow you down.  You are better off getting to a Walk by trying to walk versus planning on walking.

If you have a phone system already (a PBX), one way to move forward is to build on the phone system.  But this will typically mean an upgrade of some sort if your phone system is more than a couple years old and it will mean you have to get more people involved in the decision.  It is harder to start walking that way.  The other thing that is noteworthy about the PBX is that with all the other tools available for real-time communications, the PBX just isn’t as important anymore and you shouldn’t continue to invest in it unless it ties in with your overall communications framework.  See this blog by Marty Parker of UC Strategies – “How to Carve a PBX”.

Many people use Skype or other free consumer products for person-to-person interaction and they can work well – see this blog.  But sometimes Skype is not reliable enough or scalable enough for your organization.  Most people realize that when they start spending too much time managing the technology and not enough time focused on the business at hand, they aren’t saving anything by using free tools.  When that happens you have to move up to higher quality UC tools that can provide a richer collaborative experience, e.g. Cisco’s Jabber, Microsoft’s Lync or another commercial UC solution.

The key to person-to-person collaboration

Whether you are using Skype or a more robust UC solution, to accelerate person-to-person collaboration, the most important piece to get right is the personal technology that plugs into the call.

What do I mean by that?   Personal technology that enhances the audio and video experience by:

  1. Eliminating audio feedback / interference and provide good audio quality so people can hear and be heard.  How?
    1. Use your iPhone/iPad or other ear buds plugged into your PC, tablet or mobile
    2. Add a USB personal audio device if you are working from a quiet place and don’t want to be tethered to a device.  Cost ~ $100 to $150
  2. Enhancing the visual experience by making the video and content BIG
    1. All you need is a 2nd screen connected to your laptop or desktop which costs around $120
  3. Maintaining a good connection for quality and continuity of the call.  Although a good connection is not “personal technology”, nothing disrupts a call more than fading in or out, or dropping the call and having to reconnect.  You need a stable connection.  This one is harder to put a price tag on, but there are different ways to come at the issue:
    1. Make sure you have lots of bandwidth and that normal bandwidth use by others on the same network isn’t choking your connection
    2. Use technology that is bandwidth friendly, e.g. uses less or is adaptable to bandwidth fluctuations

A personal audio device and a 2nd screen are the best investments you can make to significantly enhance person-to-person communication in your organization.  Make the experience richer and people will be able to collaborate better.

If you can enable the person-to-person collaboration in between the “Most Important Meeting” you will have taken your organization from a collaborative crawl to a strong walk.  And that is significant progress!  I have experienced this in our own organization and seen it in others.

The next 2 steps to get to a Run are:

I’ll talk more about these in my next blog.

Moving the needle on collaboration in your organization

How to move from the 72% to the 28%

People understand from experience that when they collaborate, they can accomplish more.  And the numbers underscore that companies who collaborate better outperform their peers by 2 to 6 times.

Yet most companies or departments are in the 72% of organizations whose collaboration maturity is either, “Unsupported” or “Non-integrated”.

Whether I talk to a small businesses or a department in a large corporation, one thing is common, they all want to collaborate better.  They want to be able to do more from both an effective communication and collaboration point-of-view.  Even though they are doing some collaborative things, they know they can do more. But they aren’t sure what they should be doing next to collaborate better.  Even when we start talking about some of the things that they could be doing, they have a hard time imagining themselves using the new collaborative tools within their businesses or they can’t imagine spending any money on the tools they want to get better at collaboration.

There are many different things that you can do to build your organization’s collaborative muscle and accelerate your collaborative performance.  Here is a chart from SMART Technologies “Inspired Collaboration” initiative, which shows many of the levers which can be adjusted within your organization.

These levers are really good for a “top down” approach to collaboration within your organization, but they don’t help much when your company doesn’t have the resources to conduct a “top down” analysis.

Most organizations take a Crawl, Walk, Run (C-W-R) approach, which is a sound strategy, however, many never make it past the Crawl stage – the 72%

So how can you take the C-W-R approach and make sure you progress?

Step 1: The most important meeting

No matter how big or small your company is, let’s take the discussion down to a departmental level, to make this applicable to every businessperson,  Ask yourself – What is the most important meeting you attend that recurs at least once a month?

Chances are that whatever meeting you picked, it is some kind of an update or status meeting.  A meeting whose objective is to synchronize the activities of a team updating each other on what has happened since the last time you met.  This could be a weekly Sales meeting, Operations meeting, a Project meeting, etc. – you get the idea.

In the meeting, it is likely that the team is making adjustments to some kind of scorecard or project plan trying to monitor their progress since the last meeting and deciding where their attention needs to be directed too. Once you have identified that meeting, you should now answer these questions from a collaboration point-of-view:

Are the participants all local or are some remote?  If there are remote participants, are they all individuals or is there another meeting room somewhere that has a number of people that are joining the meeting (or both)?

What technologies are you using? How are you using them?

What is missing? How do you want everyone more engaged, more involved?

Depending on the answers to these questions you can start to incrementally make your “Most Important Meeting” better.  The first incremental improvements often don’t cost anything at all.  Why?  Because most people don’t know how to get the most out of the technology they are already using.  I sometimes sit through a customer’s “Most Important Meeting” and after the meeting is over, I point out 2 or 3 things that they can do to make the experience better for everyone just by making a few adjustments.

The next part of the crawl is to add a couple of pieces of technology that will further enhance the meeting.  These can be anywhere from a couple $100 to say $2,000.  Adding these pieces builds the quality of the meeting experience, e.g. making it easier to hear and be heard.

The next step is where we start to progress from the crawl to the walk.  Here is where we lay out how we can make the meeting better with technology, which makes collaboration easier for in-room participants, and for remote participants, makes them feel like they are in the room with the rest of the people.

This is where you have to spend more money on technology IF you want to get to this point.  The types of technology you would add:

Depending on the size of the room these technologies can add up.  Each one of them on their own can start at several thousand dollars and if you go big, 10s of thousands.  But if you have budget constraints, you can prioritize and implement them one at a time until you get to the collaborative experience that is optimal for your “Most Important Meeting”.

The “Most Important Meeting” tends to drive the priority of having room technology to accelerate collaboration and enhance communication, but from my experience it plays a secondary, but important role in an organization’s collaborative development.  You will get a much bigger payback if you can accelerate the collaboration of all the activities that take place between the “Most Important Meetings”.  If you can inject greater collaboration into the activities between the team members as they do their day-to-day jobs, you will go to a full collaborative Walk.

But how do you do that?

Step 2: team activities between the most important meetings

Stay tuned to this blog for Steps 2 to 4 on moving collaboration forward in your business or department.  But remember you can increase your collaborative muscle by:

  1. Taking small steps – some incremental things are foolproof and cost nothing
  2. Not being afraid of bigger steps
  3. Planning to learn from every step you take

And remember the goal, you can make your organization 2 to 6 times better by increasing your velocity of collaboration.

Accelerating your real-time collaboration capabilities

I was in Las Vegas for the InfoComm 2014 trade show in late June.  InfoComm is traditionally an AV industry trade show, but just like all things technology, it has been changing to reflect the current tech trends.  One of the biggest changes at InfoComm in the last couple of years has been to embrace and advance real-time collaboration.  Their focus is primarily on the room systems that are a part of the overall collaborative ecosystem.  They are starting to understand that room systems play an integral part in the UC collaborative technology ecosystem.

One of the under-current themes that came through for me at InfoComm, was the new technologies that could advance an organization’s collaborative capabilities.  These are technologies for organizations that are already using room systems as part of their real-time collaboration ecosystem, but want to advance the experience.

Why would they want to do that?  It’s because they see the payoff that they are getting from collaboration already and they want to continue cashing in.

How can they do that?

  1. By advancing the collaborative experience to make it more “like being there”
  2. By making it easier to collaborate
  3. By making the experience richer (sometimes better than being there)

These technologies are for the 28% of companies that are beyond the first 2 stages of real-time collaborative evolution.  Reminder – most companies (72%) have a collaborative environment that is either ‘Unsupported’ or ‘Not Integrated’.

To continue your journey to becoming a more advanced collaborative organization, you need to move your real-time collaboration from being a 4-6, out of 10, to say a 7-8, out of 10.  Here are a couple of technologies that can help you do that.

Array Telepresence:

High End Telepresence rooms can cost in the range of $300K to $750K.  Telepresence is the name used for the most life-like video conferencing implementations; the implementations that are closest to “being there” – see this blog for more info.

Array gives you a similar Telepresence experience for about $15K per room (to take full advantage of this technology it is ideal to have this system installed at both ends of the call).

One of the biggest problems with video conferencing implementations in typical corporate meeting rooms is what I call the “Boardroom Bowling Alley” effect.  I wrote one of my first blogs on this topic, featuring a dual camera solution from Polycom that helped eliminate this effect.  I think Array’s solution is more effective because it turns the “Boardroom Bowling Alley” into a Telepresence room vs the Polycom Eagle-Eye dual camera solution or Cisco’s Speaker track solution. With Array’s solution you get to see everyone in the room at anytime, close up – just like a Telepresence experience, while the Polycom or Cisco camera experience focuses the camera on the active speaker.  By doing that it makes the active speaker a large image on your screen on the far end, but you can’t see the rest of the people and what they are doing or how they are reacting.

Ironically, 1) they are all camera solutions to the same Boardroom Bowling Alley problem, with different approaches, and; 2) the Array solution was developed by the same guys that built Polycom’s RealPresence, high-end Telepresence systems.

The same guys who built the $750K high-end experience, just shrunk their solution to $15K per room That is cool!

Here is an image from the Array website that shows how their camera technology can transform an ordinary boardroom.

The two key components of the solution are the camera and the Array Equal-i 2S Image Improvement Processor.  You can see from the second image above that everyone in the room looks like they are sitting around a Telepresence table – but they are not, it is the same table from the first photo.

One of the big improvements in the two images is that the video is now displayed on both screens making everyone bigger.  This uses one of my 5 Technology Deployment Principles (upcoming blog) – maximize screen real estate to make things bigger.  In order to free up the second screen to be used as a part of the video image, Array has taken the content sharing feature and put it onto the boardroom tabletop, which is a principle used in high Telepresence rooms.  There would be an extra cost (in addition to the $15K) to put a few small monitors on the table to see the content. With an Array Telepresence system installed in two separate rooms on a call, the experience would be that of a full immersive system where both rooms would be able to see a dual screen improved view of the far end. There is no additional codec purchase required for this system, it will work with existing Cisco, Polycom or Lifesize codec equipment. The Array box encodes and decodes the expanded view at either end of the call.

To summarize what Array’s technology does:

  1. Brings farthest participants up close and personal
  2. Improves eye line and meeting format
  3. Powers dual displays using a single video codec
  4. Conceals camera(s) and brings wide format display

Early indications are that the highest interest for this technology is coming from companies that have already deployed and are using video conferencing for day-to-day business.  Companies who are making a marginal, additional investment in technology to upgrade the collaborative experience for their users go from say a 4 out of 10, to a 7 or 8, out of 10.

For those companies who have already made an investment in room systems throughout their organization and are making good use of these systems, an extra $15K per room is not a very big additional investment to amp up the experience by 30-100%.  Considering all the investments in equipment, network and user adoption, another $15K to significantly enhance the experience will breath a longer life into many of these rooms versus doing a total technology refresh of some kind.

Note: “Companies that have already deployed and are using video conferencing.” This is a critical phrase.  I would not recommend this technology for deployments that would ‘hope’ to drive adoption, simply by upgrading the technology.

We at ET Group are getting on board to offer and support this technology in the Canadian marketplace.  If you are interested in exploring the possible deployment in your video conferencing room systems, send an email to us through our contact page and we will get back to you.

More from InfoComm on advancing collaboration in your organization in Part 2 of this blog.  Stay tuned!

People, place and technology are coming together like never before

The workplace of the future

Technological advances are catalysts for change in any business, and those changes are happening at a faster pace than ever before. Technology is transforming who we are able to work with and how we work with them, so it can no longer be considered an afterthought when thinking about your strategy to designing the workplace.

Historically, the workplace is where people come together to work.  Relating the importance of the “Place” to design so that people could work more effectively was a natural progression of thoughtful study and experimentation.  Design, furniture and furnishing organizations have steadily advanced over the years to better understand the relationship between People & Place and to bring those findings to bear in their products and services.

Technology, until the late 70s or early 80s, really had no place as part of the workplace other than the telephone.  There really was no option for remote workers being part of the day-to-day team.  If you did need to meet with colleagues, you had to travel.  And airline travel for business boomed in the 70s, 80s and 90s.

And then the conference call became a way to allow remote participants to connect by phone call to a meeting – telecom technology.  This small advance was a big thing!  People didn’t have to travel just to participate, but it still wasn’t as good as being there.  There were cost savings, productivity gains and new models of working together that were enabled by this advance.  People who were conferenced into the meeting were soon asking for better sound quality. This requirement introduced the need for good Audio-Visual (AV) in meeting rooms.

Computer terminals and networks were part of the workplace in the 60s to 80s but it wasn’t until the PC came along in the early 80s that a PC was a commonplace personal technology for the workplace.  Even then it was more a personal technology that was connected to the corporate network/Internet and sat on desktops with limited design or thought required to integrate it into the workplace.

Another thing that was important in the workplace was sharing information in a meeting.  The early tools used to do this were blackboards, which later became flip charts and whiteboards.  Foil projectors and slides were technological advances for content sharing, when it became important to have prepared content to share in a meeting.   Then PowerPoint arrived and the AV technology’s importance as part of a meeting room grew so the PowerPoint could be shared with everyone in the room.

Then people wanted to share those PowerPoint slides with the remote participants and WebEx and other tools filled that market need.  The introduction of WebEx also required the meeting rooms to be connected to the corporate network – now IT was increasing its role as part of the workplace technology equation. IT and AV were now working together.

In the technology world, Telecom, IT and AV had all grown up independently and were considered separate areas of technology discipline.  They were all silos of technology in the workplace.  Today there is a need to create the right balance of 4 different conferencing technologies for meeting rooms.

The simplified story of technology evolution into the workplace (above) highlights the requirement for the separate technology disciplines to come together and be managed as one.  This trend is accelerating today fueled by an ever-increasing requirement to connect in real-time and the ability to connect everything to the network.

 Specifics of “people & place” with “technology” are

These technology changes are having a huge affect on the workplace.  In fact the biggest effect they are having is on the requirement for how much workspace is required.  In some cases companies are seeing real estate space reductions of up to 70%.  With real estate being one of the largest expense items for any organization, a large reduction can have a huge effect on the bottom line, but reducing real estate without consideration for a number of other factors can be perilous.  The key is to ensure that the technologies do not collide in the workplace but that they are integrated into the workplace to allow people to connect to the workspace and the workspace to connect to the building.

To learn more about how technology is driving change in the workplace and how to manage that change, please join me for the webinar, “Integrating Technology as Part of the Office Re-design”, on June 24th.

Go here to Register.

What Is WebEx Telepresence? How do WebEx and Telepresence come together?

WebEx is a program that runs on your browser allowing you to collaborate on-demand with other people.  The original WebEx program consisted of voice capabilities and content sharing. It allowed users to have a voice conversation while simultaneously sharing whatever was on their PC screen with the other users on the WebEx call. You can incorporate Webex into many different workplace designs if you plan accordingly and have the right partner to install them.

Cisco bought WebEx in 2007 and has continued to enhance its capabilities, by adding key features, such as video, and by developing a whole suite of WebEx products. These products take the same basic capability of WebEx and specialize it for different kinds of online meetings – Webinars, Support, Training, etc.  Each of these meeting environments is a little different and works best with a customized set of tools to manage the online meeting.

Telepresence is the name given to the most life-like video conferencing implementation, which is the closest video conferencing implementation to “being there”.  The size of the video images are life-like and the audio quality is superb making it seem like you are sitting across the table from the people you are meeting with, even though they are in a different part of the world.

With two great products – WebEx and Telepresence, it was natural that people would soon ask for the two to be able to connect to each other.  Last year, Cisco introduced an update to their Telepresence solutions called WebEx Telepresence.

So now callers in a video conferencing enabled room can connect via video with remote participants who are using WebEx video.

WebEx Telepresence allows participants in WebEx meetings to connect via video with participants using Telepresence video conferencing endpoints (traditional H.323 and SIP videoconferencing).  Standard room based videoconferencing systems use H.323 or SIP as the protocol to connect rooms and control the call.  Traditional manufacturers, like Cisco and Polycom, use these protocols.  WebEx on the other hand, uses a proprietary protocol that is unable to directly communicate with traditional room systems.

What is the big deal with integrating one video technology with another?

Many videoconferencing industry insiders envision a future where video conferencing is ubiquitous. They believe that it will replace voice as the main real-time communications tool in the not too distant future.  However, one of the main roadblocks preventing this is interconnectivity between video systems.  The interconnectivity problem is that different technologies are using different protocols (languages) and until they either all speak the same language or translate the protocols between them seamlessly they can’t talk to each other.  I doubt that cell phones would have ever exploded 20 years ago, if users on the AT&T network couldn’t call Verizon customers or if Android phones could only call other Android phones.

To your average user, particularly those who use consumer video conferencing technologies like FaceTime and Skype, this seems like a straightforward task to accomplish.

“If I can FaceTime with Mom to wish her a Merry Christmas from the beach in Costa Rica, surely an enterprise boardroom should be able to make a video call to a PC based video desktop, particularly if they are both using Cisco products”

But we also know that Skype users can’t connect with FaceTime users – different protocols.  Those of us in the business know that getting all the video technologies to work together is easier said than done. It took Cisco almost four years since the acquisition of Tandberg in 2010 to get WebEx to talk to their Telepresence systems, resulting in the launch of WebEx Telepresence.

Why is it important?

I have many different clients who have been eagerly waiting for this capability. Some are educational institutions who want to leverage existing rooms, equipped with HD cameras, codecs and audio systems, to collaborate with research partners who could be located anywhere in the world and equipped only with a laptop.

Others are large enterprises that want to connect individual employees in remote locations with groups in central locations, who have access to video conferencing enabled boardrooms.

Sure there are many ways to tackle these requirements with different technologies, but when you have already made an investment in videoconferencing enabled rooms, infrastructure and WebEx, it makes a lot of sense to be able to connect them together.

WebEx has an excellent reputation for providing desktop web conferencing and superior audio conferencing capabilities. The addition of WebEx Telepresence means that these features can now be added to the high end video call experience. Unlimited audio users can also join a video call from anywhere in the world, be it from a phone or desktop computer. This new capability also means that iPad users can now join a video call on a Cisco system with high resolution video.

What is required?

In order to implement WebEx Telepresence you will need to have the following infrastructure, at the right release levels:

Summary

WebEx Telepresence offers a great way to connect two powerful collaboration worlds – WebEx and Telepresence. WebEx Telepresence solves one particular problem; connecting remote WebEx based videoconferencing participants with Telepresence room based systems.

Whether or not WebEx Telepresence makes sense for your organization will largely depend on what you are starting with or your current infrastructure.  If you already have Cisco video infrastructure and are using WebEx then it’s definitely worth looking at combining the two together to create an even more powerful collaboration environment.

Allowing different videoconferencing systems to communicate is a positive step towards ubiquitous videoconferencing.

Contact us if you have questions or would like assistance in connecting the WebEx and Telepresence systems.

Is sustainability worth it for SME’s?

Sustainability talk, and increasingly more sustainability walk, have become mainstream in large enterprises as a viable and highly profitable business strategy. Paying attention to the triple bottom line (people, planet, and profit) is also a great risk management strategy. If you need proof, simply look at the empirical research completed by Bob Willard over the past 12 years. Bob is an expert in the business case for sustainability and his research shows companies that integrate sustainability into their strategy grow their profits by 51% to 81% over a 3 to 5 year period. Those are some nice numbers.

But do those amazing results apply to SME’s? Can we afford to invest our limited time and resources to focus on people, planet, and profit? Should we care about sustainability if we do not face the same pressure and reputational risk that larger companies do? Is sustainability worth it for Small and Medium sized Enterprises?

The short answer is absolutely. Here are three reasons why:

1. Sustainability gives your company purpose, strengthens culture and increases productivity

If you are similar to ET Group, your biggest strength comes from your company culture and the dedication of your employees. But, how can sustainability help solidify your company’s purpose, create a stronger culture and keep your employees engaged?

By definition, a sustainability lens focuses companies to do what is best for the planet, people, and profit. Thus, it gives your company a reason to exist that people can believe in; a valuable purpose that is extremely motivating and engaging for employees. In fact, purpose is proven to be more effective at driving extraordinary performance than any external rewards (commissions, bonuses, etc.). I know this not just because of Daniel Pink’s incredible TED talk, but because I live it everyday at ET Group.

Engaged employees are highly productive because they believe in your company and what it stands for. They want to contribute to the well-being of the company and their colleagues, so they work extra hard to ensure success. Focusing on people, planet, and profit will help you strengthen your company’s purpose or it may even help you find a new one that resonates more with your employees and potential clients. A worthwhile purpose will:

2. Focusing on people, profit, and planet makes your company more resilient and better able to adapt to change

Businesses can only survive over the long term if they are creating value. Historically, value created by companies was measured exclusively in economic terms, but the definition is rapidly changing. True value is starting to be defined by financial, social, and environmental metrics, so SME’s have to consider their impact in each of these realms if they want to prevail over the long run.

Sustainability forces you to widen your lens to take into account impacts on people and the environment. This broader perspective makes you aware of potential risks and opportunities that may be coming down the pipe. For a great summary of business opportunities and risks tied to sustainability, read the executive summary of Expect the Unexpected: Building Business Value in a Changing World by KPMG.

As we know, natural resources will be increasingly constrained in the years to come. Supplies are limited in this finite planet, but the demands of our increasing population are not. Also, energy prices are rising and are expected to continue doing so, putting pressure on our margins. Finally, sustainability is increasingly becoming an important branding component that resonates with employees and some of our customers who value corporate social responsibility in the companies they do business with.

These trends impact us all, so it is imperative that SME’s start actively focusing on sustainability now if they want to be competitive in the future. An early focus in sustainability will give SME’s rewards like lower energy costs, reduced waste and more efficient transportation.

From experience, recycling e-Waste became a new source of revenue for ET Group and I know we will save a significant amount of money when we refresh our fleet with more fuel-efficient vehicles. I strongly believe that a commitment to sustainability will end up building long-lasting, beneficial relationships with quality customers and suppliers. All of these reasons positively impact the bottom line today and help mitigate future negative impacts.

 3. Sustainability pushes SME’s to innovate so they can stay relevant with their customers

As sustainability gains momentum, consumers will demand more sustainable products and practices, so companies who produce and embrace them will benefit significantly. Furthermore, as more and more externalities are incorporated into accounting practices, only truly sustainable products and services will have a pricing advantage over regular products so sustainability-driven innovation is not just a benefit, it is a must.

In simple terms we will need to reinvent many of the products and solutions we offer today so we remain relevant to our customers. At the ET Group we find that incredibly exciting and a real privilege! We need to redesign our own industry to become more sustainable and we continuously need to offer better collaboration technology products and solutions that will ultimately help other industries transform for the better. For more information on this check out my blog post: The link between collaboration technologies and sustainability.

New products and solutions usually result in more sales, higher margins, and exciting work, which makes for a healthy working environment. Therefore, innovating should be seen as a great opportunity for leading SME’s out there.

SME’s should invest in sustainability now, before it hits them like a freight train from their blind side. I strongly believe SME’s are critical to make sustainability mainstream and that we have a huge opportunity to take a leadership role and make it happen. In an upcoming post I will provide my thoughts on how SME’s can strategically embark on the road towards sustainability, so I would love to get some input and real life experiences from our readers out there.

The journey towards sustainability is a challenging one, but we can make it fun and exciting if we work together. It is also our duty and responsibility as a business community to ensure that we can thrive for generations to come.

If you like this post please share it with your network and give us feedback in the comment section below! If you want to learn more about what we are doing at ET Group to start our journey towards sustainability, please let us know and we will be happy to share with you. We are on a journey and we have a long way to go, but we are committed to getting there.

Why I Choose Videoconferencing to Collaborate

In the early days of videoconferencing system, most vendors focused on the ROI of replacing expensive travel. It was easy to justify the expense of a videoconferencing system by eliminating a few executive trips, but as a user of video on a daily basis, I believe that the real value of videoconferencing lies in replacing phone calls and intra-city travel.

A person-to-person video call is much closer to a face to face meeting, than a phone call is – closer to being there. To make the experience as close to “being there” it is important to enhance the richness of the call with a large monitor and good audio quality.  I use the CHAT 50 from ClearOne, it’s a USB powered speakerphone with built-in echo and noise cancellation, and it eliminates the need for me to wear headphones or ear buds, making the call feel more natural.

If you are solely focused on the ROI of replacing phone calls, it is more difficult to sell the value of videoconferencing. But if you shift the focus to include the soft benefits, videoconferencing can be a powerful tool to enhance communications and collaboration.

Video Is More Likely to Be Used in Place of a Phone Call, than as an Alternative to Travel

In our bi-weekly sales meeting the team assembles in our main boardroom, one of the participants (RD) is remote, so he participates via videoconference.  We have two 80” displays and since RD is using a desktop video client (Vidyo), he appears larger than life on one of the displays; the other display is used to share content. Typically this works very well, everyone in the room can interact with RD as if he was in the room, we even tease him about his shirt selection.

Recently, due to logistics, RD was only able to join using a phone. We often have a roundtable discussion where each of us to raise issues and share experiences; after going around the table we were about to wrap up when RD spoke up and I realized that we had all forgotten that RD was part of the meeting – this never happens on a videoconference.

Videoconferencing Adds to a Rich Meeting Experience

In my work life, I have spent countless hours on audio conferences, both as a remote participant and in the meeting rooms. Audio conferencing enables remote participation but it has many shortcomings:

VideoConferencing CallIt takes a very effective meeting facilitator to make sure everyone is engaged and heard in audio conferences.

Webconferencing tools help with this problem because they show a list of participants and often show who is speaking. But, it’s easy to lose track of this feature when you are focussed on the content being shared.

My experience with video calls is quite different. With effectively enabled video, you can have eye to eye contact and it’s much easier for all participants to remain engaged.  It’s difficult for remote participants to hide or check email, as it’s apparent that they aren’t focussed on the discussion.  My perception is that video conferencing leads to shorter more engaged calls, I haven’t seen any studies to back this up, but as video calls become more ubiquitous I’m sure we will see more research done.

We have all heard the statistics, according to a UCLA study 93% of communication effectiveness is determined by nonverbal cues. Anyone who was tried video calls understands how it’s a richer experience than audio only.

A few weeks ago I had scheduled a face to face meeting in our office with one of our suppliers and two other colleagues.  At the last minute we had to postpone the meeting and due to scheduling we ended up having the call via a videoconference.  We had 5 participants, each using a desktop videoconferencing client. I was at home and could clearly see all 4 remote participants in a “Hollywood Squares” configuration on my 20” monitor.  It worked wonderfully; I don’t think it would have been any better if we had all been in the same room.  We could have all driven to our office for the meeting, but by doing it via videoconferencing we collectively saved approximately 10 hours of driving time, not to mention the environmental benefits. Had we done the same meeting using a web conference and audio only, we would have lost a lot of the communications richness.  It would not have been as close to “being there”.

When Does Audio Conferencing/Web Conferencing Fit?

I’m not saying that audio conferences aren’t still relevant, there are times when video communication isn’t practical or when many of the participants don’t have access to the technology.  And web conferencing adds an important layer of richness to an audio conference. It is not an either or discussion, the more conferencing elements that can be effectively combined, the richer the experience.

I use videoconferencing in place of phone calls regularly with my colleagues and prefer it in most instances, but there are times when audio and/or web conferencing are a better fit:

Earlier this year I participated in webcast hosted by a videoconferencing vendor. This was for a product announcement and there were over 200 people globally connected via the vendor’s videoconferencing technology. The technology worked well but we were able to see several of the remote participants, including a person driving down the highway while enjoying a coffee!  As you can imagine watching the other participants became quite distracting and in this case an audio only conference with web conferencing might have worked better. Just like a audio conference call, certain protocols must be observed by participants. If you are going to do a videoconference for a one to many scenario, then I suggest setting it up so participants can only see the presenter.

I Always Choose Video Calls over Audio Calls

It seems we are living in a time of unlimited communications tools and new choices seem to pop up every day.  From my experience and, if given the choice, I find a video call provides a much richer, focussed communications experience than voice only and I choose to use it whenever possible.

If you are interested in learning more about the unrealized benefits of videoconferencing don’t hesitate to Contact Us.

What is the difference between Communication and Communications?

Communication is a shared experience.

Communications is how that experience is shared.

It is not uncommon to see these two terms used interchangeably. Outside of the technology world, most wouldn’t even blink when they hear the term “communications” used in the wrong context. 

However, while in many contexts “communications” is assumed to be the plural of “communication,” in the business world it’s actually a term used to describe the network of technology tools an organization uses to communicate. When trying to map out how your business operates, this is an important distinction. 

Is your tongue all twisted up yet? 

Let’s really break it down. 

Different types of communication…

The first thing to keep in mind when it comes to communication is there are two different types: “real-time” communication and “iterative” communication. Also known as synchronous vs. asynchronous communication.

The easiest way to tell the difference is this: if you cut the connection and the collaboration session ends, it is real time (or synchronous), if it doesn’t end, it is iterative (or asynchronous).

When you are in a video meeting and you leave the session, then the conversation is over – this is real-time communication. If you want to continue the conversation verbally, you have to rejoin the meeting, or schedule another one.

If your coworker sends you an email at 7:00pm on Tuesday, but you don’t respond until 10:00am on Wednesday, this is an iterative communication. This is still a continuous conversation, but not all parties are required to be present at the same time to keep the information flowing.

…Require different communications tools

Communications tools that aid real-time communication can look very different depending on the type of work you do and where your employees are. In an increasingly hybrid world, many organizations are finding more and more of their team members working remotely. 

This means we not only need to be considering what tools and technologies are available in the office — such as ceiling microphones, life-like sized screens and high quality speakers — but also need to keep in mind what remote members have access to. 

This is why communications platforms such as Microsoft Teams or Webex are an important bridge. These platforms are extremely adaptable and accessible from anywhere on any device. Employees working remote and in- office can connect to the same environment and have a high quality experience without missing information or feeling disconnected.

Iterative communications tools can also range from instant messaging platforms, to digital whiteboarding apps, even websites for recording asynchronous video. 

The key to iterative communications is keeping things organized. Project management tools such as Trello and Asana are great for tracking progress, leaving update notes for your team and linking important documents.

Giving your people the power to work when they are most focused — without the pressure of trying to coordinate who is available and when — actually saves time and leads to higher quality work much faster.

Communication is the core of every interaction we have

The relative framing for different types of communication, enabled by different types of communications, gives us an insightful view into how we collaborate.

If we can help our organizations to be better at communicating, we unleash the abilities to prioritize our time better, perform better, and connect better. 

How can we be better at communicating? Here are two transformative things you can do:

Need help?

ET Group is here for you. Contact us to book a Discovery Call today, and find the communications tools you need to help your business thrive! 

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Does Too Much Collaboration at Work Hurt Productivity?

Most Workers Struggle to Work Effectively.

According to the global architecture and design company, Gensler, who recently released their 2013 US Workplace Survey, most workers struggle to work effectively. A Toronto paper picked up the story with a headline stating, “Too much collaboration at work hurts productivity.” Does this mean that your organization should not strive for more collaboration?

No. It means that if you don’t strike the right balance, it can lead to unwanted and potentially negative results. Finding the right design for a collaboration workspace the right way is key to finding this equilibrium.

Getting it Wrong. Then Getting it Right.

Malcolm Gladwell illustrates an example of the advertising agency TBWAChiatDay in his New Yorker article Designs for Working. He cites, “The firm had been engaged in a radical, and in some ways disastrous, experiment with a “nonterritorial” office: no one had a desk or any office equipment of his own. It was a scheme that courted failure by neglecting all the ways in which an office is a sort of neighbourhood.

By contrast, their new office is an almost perfect embodiment of Jacobsian principles of community. The agency is in a huge old warehouse, three stories high and the size of three football fields. It is informally known as Advertising City, and that’s what it is: a kind of artfully constructed urban neighbourhood. … Sprinkled throughout the building are meeting rooms and project areas and plenty of nooks where employees can closet themselves when they need to.”

An Effective Balance Between Order and Chaos is Required.

Steve Johnson, author of “Where Good Ideas Come From”, comments on the TBWAChiatDay first new office.

“By all accounts it was a colossal failure, precisely because it traded excessive order for excessive chaos … To work in an open office is to work exclusively in public, which it turns out to have just as many drawbacks as working entirely in your private lab.”

The Concept of Liquid Networks for Getting the Right Balance.

Johnson’s book introduces the concept of “Liquid Networks” as a metaphor for the right balance.  Liquid, as opposed to gaseous or solid.  A gaseous network is too volatile, the chaos referred to above, and a solid network is too ridged to sustain idea flow.

Johnson cites the work of Kevin Dunbar, McGill University psychologist indicates, “Even with all the advanced technology of a leading molecular biology lab, the most productive tool for generating good ideas remains a circle of humans at a table, talking shop.  The lab meeting creates an environment where new combinations can occur, where information can spill over from one project to another.  When you work alone in an office, peering into a microscope, your ideas can get trapped in place, stuck in your own initial biases.  The social flow of the group conversation turns that private solid into a liquid network.”

Dunbar’s generative conference room meetings remind us that the physical architecture of our work environments can have a transformative effect on the quality of our ideas.

“The quickest way to freeze a liquid network is to stuff people into private offices behind closed doors, which is one reason so many Web-era companies have designed their work environments around common spaces where casual mingling and interdepartmental chatter happens without any formal planning.”

Back to the Gladwell article …

“But when employees sit chained to their desks, quietly and industriously going about their business, an office is not functioning as it should. That’s because innovation—the heart of the knowledge economy—is fundamentally social. Ideas arise as much out of casual conversations as they do out of formal meetings. More precisely, as one study after another has demonstrated, the best ideas in any workplace arise out of casual contacts among different groups within the same company.  [Johnson’s Liquid Network] …

Innovation comes from the interactions of people at a comfortable distance from one another, neither too close nor too far.  …

The catch is that getting people in an office to bump into people from another department is not so easy as it looks.”

Johnson says that,

“… if there is a single maxim through [his] book’s arguments, it is that we are better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them. … Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine.  They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders.  They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete.”

Or, simply put – to be more innovative you have to be more collaborative.  You need to put yourself in a position where you are bumping into, colliding with and spilling into other people’s perspectives and ideas.  Because doing so will trigger new thoughts and ideas that you wouldn’t explore in isolation.

The Gensler study goes on to say that, “… focus and collaboration are complementary work modes. … We know that both focus and collaboration are crucial to the success of any organization in today’s economy.”  In a balanced workplace, the employees thrive.

4 Different Modes of Working.

A Steelcase white paper, “How the workplace can improve collaboration”, June 2010, talks about a shift in the nature of work from more individual focused to more collaboration focused.

“Among the key findings was validation that a fundamental shift has occurred: most work today is done in collaboration with others versus individually. Moreover, rather than it being a segmented activity done in designated destinations such as a conference room, collaboration

is now almost constant and it threads throughout the entire workday. It occurs at desks, in hallways, in team spaces, on smart phones and via the Internet, and it’s often spontaneous and informal versus planned in advance. When the workspace is designed to fully support the new realities of collaboration, better learning, more innovation and faster decision-making can result.”

The white paper goes on to say that its study has revealed that people actually need 4 different modes of working:

  1. Focus Time
  2. Collaboration Time
  3. Learning
  4. Socializing

The mix will depend on who you are and what you do.  The balance of the 4 modes will vary.

How do remote workers fit into this “Collaboration soup”?

Part 2, we explore whether being in the same physical space is critical to increasing collaboration.

If you would like further information on how to obtain the right balance of various working modes for your organization, please contact us.

3 Steps to Building a Collaborative Business

Investing in technology tools that drive innovation and connect key stakeholders will help accelerate collaboration only if people know how to use these tools. Otherwise, instead of accelerating collaboration, you’ve just purchased some expensive dust collectors.

This is why adopting technology is just as important as the technology itself to advance collaboration within your organization.

Initiating User Adoption

What is involved in effective user adoption? Typically a training team is assembled and directed as to what should be covered in a training session. A more effective approach is to initiate user adoption by taking a “top-down” approach in communicating the vision. All collaboration sponsors should take the opportunity and put collaboration into practice. How can you capitalize on the opportunity?

The 3 Step Approach to Effective Technology Adoption

Using this approach will lead to successful technology adoption.

  1. Assessment
  2. Implementation
  3. Evaluation

It is important to note that in order to have real change in behaviour, it also takes time, a strategy and resources to make it happen.

1. Assessment

During the assessment phase, it is important to determine the strategy gaps that prevent an organization from achieving their collaboration goals. To successfully conduct an assessment, everyone must keep an open mind and avoid coming into the process with a predetermined solution in hand. Assessments must be extensive and include examining the organization’s needs in the three areas of collaboration: culture, process, and technology. Begin to collaborate by bringing in other resources such as HR, finance, and IT to help determine the organization’s current state. Describe the desired state and map the gap between the two. The assessment should aim to identify what the best solutions are to help achieve the organization’s desired goal. Many organizations believe that training will close the gap but it may not necessarily be the case. What if the assessment indicates that there are gaps in processes? The gaps can be filled.  For example, adjusting the way a purchase order is completed. Or, a culture gap may require extensive strategic changes that effect how the organization functions as a whole. It is key that executives tap into the knowledge of their training departments by completing a needs assessment prior to conducting training. Executives should also encourage other departments to collaborate in the assessment phase in order to ensure that information sharing lays the ground work for the next phase, the implementation strategy.

2. Implementation

Teamwork is vital during the implementation step. For example, introducing video conferencing, as a corporate-wide strategic initiative should include multiple stakeholders. The planning and implementation process should include a partnership between IT, Finance, Project Management, Training, and an executive sponsor. All the partners should participate in sharing their knowledge and insight to develop and execute the plan. The result of collaborating and openly sharing ideas is two-fold: an innovative plan and better buy-in leads to a higher adoption rate. When implementing a business improvement measure, a learning and development professional will recommend many short training sessions. This allows people to have the opportunity to absorb what they have learned and trainers can reinforce concepts. Real change occurs when what has been taught becomes the norm. Learners must be encouraged to adopt behaviours that support the business improvement strategy; this is where tangible organizational change will occur. Make the implementation process an evolution not a revolution.

3. Evaluation

There is a great saying: “What gets focused on gets done.” This is what the evaluation phase is all about. This is a time when organizations should review what is actually happening after training and this should be done shortly after training – say 4 to 6 months afterwards. A successful evaluation should include:

Teamwork should play a role in this phase as well. For an in-depth evaluation, consider using focus groups as a tool. Two focus groups should be conducted with:

  1. Stakeholders that were involved in planning and implementing the strategy
  2. Employees who are impacted to allow them to share their knowledge and experiences

Share feedback widely. Celebrate the accomplishments.

The knowledge collected from your evaluation stage will help you get a better understanding of how well collaborative approaches work in your organization and will help the organization to develop more informed plans for future implementations.

“I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.”

– Confucius

Confucius (Chinese philosopher & reformer, 551 BCE – 479 BCE) said, “I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.” This holds true when using collaboration in assessing, implementing and evaluating changes to how your organization does business.

Collaboration technology that has been embraced by employees allows the organization to realize the true benefits the technology was meant to enable and encourages a culture of knowledge sharing, appreciation of challenges and successes, and becoming more flexible and competitive.

If you would like more information on the 3 Steps to Building a Collaborative Business, contact us.