Show me the money
When it comes to return on investment, the most obvious benchmark is reducing your travel and sustenance bill, but both of our interviewees believed this to be too narrow a criterion. “Some of it’s about real-estate,” said McLaughlin, “so you don’t need to have an office of the same size if you’re going to allow people to work from home. But also, there’s the ability to get stuff done quicker, to organise diaries without having to worry where people are, and getting the right people together sooner.
“You might have a guru who has to travel around the world, so it could take them weeks to get somewhere – but with online conferencing, you can call on those resources almost instantly – and you can probably squeeze them into twice as many meetings in a day. So much of it is about helping companies make decisions and bringing products to market quicker.”
Polycom has customers in fashion retail that outsource manufacturing to India and the Far East. By using online conferencing to keep in touch with remote workshops and offices, the company has shaved weeks off its manufacturing schedules, which can make the difference between selling at full list price (by delivering on time) or at a discount of 10% to 20%.
On a more personal level, it can lead to a more productive workforce by freeing them to work from wherever is most convenient and, as McGroarty explains, can even help with staff retention. “We’ve had large organisations that have benchmarked female return-to-work rates after pregnancy, and on seeing that other companies are able to retain female staff more effectively, they’ve asked us how online videoconferencing can help them achieve a better profile in that space.”
Right for you?
Convinced? Then your first step is to assess what you need, what difference you want it to make, and how it will work with your existing communications infrastructure.
“Many companies will have made a significant investment over a number of years,” said Cisco’s McLaughlin. “Rather than throw all of that away, we want to make sure that we can sweat more of that asset, so that companies will get an even better return on the investment.”