New Articles from Frost & Sullivan!
At ACT, we're very fortunate to have a wealth of experience just walking around the office. For example, Gary, one of our regular blog writers, has been in conferencing and telecom for somewhere between 10-80 years. (I don't remember exactly how long it's been. I could go over to Gary's office and ask, and that probably would have taken less time than writing this explanation.) But occasionally you want a perspective from outside the company. When we were given the opportunity to partner with a company that spends all day, every day studying the industry -- how to get the most out the technology, what's new and exciting, etc -- we jumped at the chance.
I'm happy to introduce Paul Waadevig, Senior Consultant - Unified Communications at Frost & Sullivan. Paul will be writing exclusive articles for us each month throughout the year to talk about best practices in the conferencing and unified communications space. We decided to call the series "Leveraging your conferencing platform", which pretty accurate describes what Paul will be talking about.
Read the articles!
In response to Paul's first two articles, I'll have to add my quick two cents in agreement. At the end of February's article, we see several good examples of how to create a "sticky" corporate culture -- in other words, providing an environment in which employees feel more connected with the people around them, and doing so without making everyone fly across the country or the world every couple of months. Improving corporate culture is a great possibility, to be sure, but I think many of these concepts could be brought to day-to-day gatherings as well. What about creating more sticky meetings?
To set some background, I was blessed with great concentration...... on one thing at a time. My friends always know when I'm trying to watch TV while talking to them because all my responses are three beats late and consist of 95% verbs. "Multitasking" at work typically means typing an email as fast as I can and hoping I remember there's a meeting going on around me before someone asks me a question. Even if you're slightly more multithreaded than I am, let's face it, we all find ourselves working on something else when we're not actively engaged in an audio-only call.
Enter web and video conferencing. If you need to run a sticky meeting -- keeping those eyes and brains focused on your message -- one of the best options is to take up more of your audience's senses. Personally, I find myself much more involved if I see the leader clicking through a PowerPoint, and even more so if I can actually see the person presenting (not to mention if they can see me). The visuals give me another point of reference. Even if I had to respond to an instant message from my boss during your presentation, I can click back to the web conference and see at a glance where we are. With audio only, I often find myself scrambling to catch up.
And this leaves me curious --- what is the strangest story you have about a person (maybe yourself) who was caught concentrating on something else during a meeting? I bet there are some good ones out there.