If your organization has more than one location that’s more than 100 miles apart, the costs of communicating in person are significant.
- Travel (car rental, gas, etc.)
- Accommodation
- Paid travel time
- Meals
- Maintaining or renting meeting facilities
These aren’t the real costs though. The reality is that if cost is a factor at all in communication, it just doesn’t happen.
The consequence of leadership not communicating in an organization is severe. Most business failures come from a failure to get together and strategize. When leadership and responsibility is scattered, and not coordinated, then the right hand does not know what the left is doing. Any one particular problem in your organization can easily go neglected for long enough to the point of becoming a threat to the entire organization this way. Problems can not be left unaddressed, and addressing problems across an organization with more than one location requires collaboration.
There’s no telling how many medium-sized businesses fail because of a lack of coordination and a failure to strategize. They fail because they aren’t coordinated enough with their vendors, their customers, and within themselves. They avoid doing this for entirely rational reasons. Because they understand communication as face-to-face and see those communications as too costly to be feasible, and they are right.
If your organization is a medium-sized organization that serves larger entities, across more than one physical location, then it is important to know that a lack of communication between your management is the number one killer for organizations at your scale.
You need to have the tools to eliminate those costs in those daily or weekly communications, so that they can be allowed to happen in the first place.
If the prospect of communicating regularly on the weekly or even daily time-scale seems strange or extreme to you, then you are de-facto missing out on growth, and you are exposing your business to long-term systemic risk. Building a habit of communicating between management on the weekly or even daily scale is an imperative that every growing organization shares.
What does the solution to this look like?
Organizations that are growing and are healthy in the 21st century regularly practice lean, and frequent digital communication. You are in fact already seeing people start towards this fact of life in your organization right now. It’s impromptu. People are texting each other. They are emailing each other. They are calling each other. They are taking pictures and sending them to their bosses. They are doing these when they have a specific problem that they need one other person to help with.
They’re just not having meetings and conferences together this way because you don’t have and distribute those tools in your organization.
So what does it look like when you do?
You can expect middle management to get a lot more efficient.
When you give middle management video conferencing tools, they can now more regularly talk to one another from their offices, phones and laptops that they already have. If one of them has a whiteboard in their office that’s a bonus. It doesn’t require much more than what you already have.
These modern video conferencing systems are just as if not actually more rich than in person meetings, because of how well they can connect with desktop computer environments. It’s easier to show things like CAD files and emails in a web conference than it is in an actual physical meeting room, for example. You can still see facial expressions and experience high quality audio the same way you do in person.
They also open up the possibility of working remotely, so you could even have people working in the field while present in a video conference meeting. If there is a specific on-site problem, you can now show that directly to all management in a way that cannot feasibly be done physically.
Most importantly, eliminating the costs of actually having a meeting allows for management to build a healthy habit of actually communicating and not relying on he-said-she-said which is how it’s done now.
There are other huge benefits for middle management when it comes to using these tools too, and not just for medium-sized organizations.
What if my organization is really big?
If you are a publicly traded company, or a trans-national NGO, university, or hospital, then cost isn’t really a consideration for the top level management. You’re not going to move your quarterly meetings to video conferencing because it turns out having that meeting once a quarter costs an extra $40,000 in travel expenses if you are Exxon Mobil.
If you are on that global scale, you have a large tier of middle and lower-middle managers who also do constantly travel to things you easily could move to live video conferencing.
As it turns out, when you have hundreds of these managers travelling around all the time, just saving on 20% of those flights and hotel rooms really adds up. Depending on your scale, by either adopting video conferencing and collaboration tools, or just by using them more, you could be saving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, or hundreds of thousands of dollars per week.
This is a decision that quickly pays off.
Training costs
Lower middle management roles are charged with executing the day to day business operations of every organization and they also have to train every employee. This is a task that in the best-case scenario they have to repeat for every employee and in the more realistic case just don’t have time for.
You can see how this can nearly inevitably lead to a very serious problem. As soon as a wave of turn-over happens at the bottom tiers of your organization, the middle management gets swamped when they step in to carry out the day to day business operations themselves, and that takes priority over training the new employees properly.
So how does collaboration software help with that?
If you are recording your meetings and you are giving the middle management the ability to record their employee training it becomes inevitable that this evergreen content that you internally generate will work its way into your training procedures.
It means that specialized employee training can exist on a systematic, procedural level that happens as long as middle-management knows and understands this tool. To give you an idea of exactly who uses this software-based method of approach to solving a kind of training problem, the number one existing market for this kind of collaboration software is in the education industry.
Professors are using this in their lectures to train students.
These tools, if used, innately automate much of the painful training process for new employees doing specialized work.
Our video conferencing solution
Our video conferencing solution tackles common problems and includes:
- Proper collaboration software that middle-management needs to habituate using
- Is affordable on the enterprise-level
- Is purpose-built with white-labeling
- Self-hosting, and enterprise security in mind
- Is a content management system for building training resources
We’ve been in the industry for decades, building exactly that. It’s the highest value solution to this universal bottleneck in organized communication.
