Skype for Business brings personal connection back to remote meetings
How many times have you heard a teenager or university student answer questions about their future career aspirations with this line? “I really want a career that will include lots of travel.” And yes, work travel sounds glamourous and like a good way to see the world on your employers’ time and money.Sadly, a few years down the track when you’re into your career, you quickly learn that work travel isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Travelling to meetings interstate often means super-early starts and late night flights home, to try to save money on hotel costs. International travel rarely includes time to actually do any sightseeing. And if you end up having a family, it means precious time away from them.
Meeting in-person is often unnecessary
Here’s just some of the reasons why travelling for meetings is placing burdens on companies and employees:
- Added expense of flights, taxis, accommodation
- Lost productivity from time out of the office
- Time away from family
- Lost down-time for employees increases chance of resentment and burnout
Skype for Business provides an alternative
Skype for Business provides a cost-effective alternative to expensive and time-consuming face-to-face meetings. And the benefits don’t only mean reduced travel spend. Other benefits include:
- Group audio and video meetings with up to 250 people—even if they aren’t using Skype for Business themselves, saving money on travel and phone costs
- Participants can join with a single click from a range of devices, including smartphones, tablets, PCs, phones, and meeting room devices
- Ability to record audio and video calls, allowing replay for people who couldn’t make the meeting live
- Collect team feedback instantly with advanced options including polls and Q&A
- Screen-sharing, so you can show people exactly what you’re talking about, rather than sending follow-up messages late
- Enhanced collaboration with the ability to use integrated real-time co-authoring
- Real-time information about your contacts’ online status and availability, so you don’t spend half your day playing phone tag
- Transferring files via instant messenger, reducing load on email servers
Saving money on meeting costs can help your business redirect those funds in a more strategic way. It can free up money for R&D, investing more resources in customer service, new marketing strategies and more.
Change management strategies are crucial to a successful shift to teleconferencing
Of course, shifting to Skype for Business can be a significant change to how things are done for in your organisation. That’s why a clear adoption plan that includes change management strategies is crucial to getting the most impact from adopting Skype for Business – or any new technology.Green Dot’s proven technology change management methodology will help your employees to understand why Skype for Business is being implemented, what the anticipated benefits will be, how it will improve their working lives, and of course, how to use Skype for Business. We’ll help you to create clear business use case scenarios so people can make decisions on when to use Skype for Business and when a face-to-face meeting is in fact the best choice – rather than just the default option of how things have always been done.
