The lines of demarcation between work and life beyond office walls may have largely disappeared in many organizations, but that’s not to say employees are always accessible when they’re out of the office. With summer officially kicking off on Wednesday, there could be mounting anxiety about reaching vacationing coworkers.
New industry research sheds light on some of these, and other, concerns in the workplace, as well as the power of enterprise video to help enhance and personalize employee communications.
A Ragan Communications and Qumu report, “Maximizing Remote Employee Collaboration with Video,” finds that 81.6% of the 107 corporate communicators polled in June say it’s difficult to communicate with coworkers when they are out of the office. At the same time, 77.1% believe adoption of mobile-workforce technologies would increase efficiency.
Chris Zaloumis, Qumu’s VP of product management, says advancements in the company’s new video control center platform “represent huge benefits for teleworkers and flextime employees who are often working from home. It means they can stay more engaged. They can watch an employee all-hands meeting while on the bus or at their kid’s soccer game or anywhere they happen to be. They get real time information and are able to engage and ask questions, just like full-time employees and employees based at the main office do.”
Most of the respondents indicated a preference for video over a non-video alternative for company-wide or department meetings (62.4%), followed by in place of technical documents to describe complicated products (60.4%), training sessions delivered by HR staffers (58.4%), in place of traveling to attend a seminar (54.5%), conference calls taken from home (22.8%) and conference calls with potential clients (40.6%).
The findings also suggest a distaste for long training videos, with 80.6% of respondents suggesting they should be anywhere from two to 10 minutes.
The biggest preference for a live video feed over pre-recorded message involves a need to collaborate with colleagues on a project (79.4%), followed by an ability to ask questions during training (68.6%) and view an address from the CEO announcing important company news (58.8%).
As for keeping certain videos confidential, most cited a CEO address announcing company financial situation internally (84.0%), followed by descriptions of future products (73%) and a corporate product “positioning” presentation for sales staffers (57%). Confidentiality was deemed important by just 38% of the respondents on the issue of describing employee benefits and costs, while 15% said the same about motivational videos designed to excite employees about their company and 13% agreed in the case of sexual harassment training videos.
While 43% of respondents say they’re too busy to produce their own video content in the workplace, 47% believe an employee’s ability to upload video increases. “This indicates a need for easier ways of publishing employee generated content to ensure employees can contribute video whenever the need arises without hesitation,” according to the report.
Bruce Shutan is a Los Angeles freelance writer.
