With hybrid working on the rise, businesses must pay more attention to one of the most valuable tools in their collaborative wheelhouse – the virtual meeting.
It’s coming up to three years since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Businesses have had a strong taste of remote working – we at TechQuarters even converted our organisation to be entirely remote – but the growing trend in business is hybrid working. For all the people that found remote work to be fulfilling and rewarding, just as many people that they did not get on well with it at all.
Herein lies the value of hybrid working – nobody has to compromise; everyone can work in whichever way suits them the best. With this trend growing, businesses need to make sure that they are leveraging all the right tools to make hybrid working as effective as it has potential to be.
Hybrid Work, Modernization and the Virtual Meeting
Even with much of the business world looking to shift away from remote-only work, there is no denying that virtual interactions will continue to be a major part of work. Many of the hallmarks of modern business rely on the use of virtual channels of communication and interaction. Some examples of this include:
Customer & Supplier Relations – The main goal for many organisations wanting to start hybrid working, is to forge more successful and productive relationships with customers and business partners. In order to do this, organisations must make every interaction with customers and partners meaningful and valuable for all parties.
Hyperconnectivity – There is much value to get extracted from forging connections between all areas of one’s business. More and more organisations are looking to get rid of data siloes, in favour of more fluid interactions and transactions that allow businesses to be more agile.
Recruitment – One of the most popular benefits of modernization and hybrid work practices is the way it enables businesses to recruit talent indiscriminately. With the right tools, and the right company culture, an organisation can preside over a highly successful, highly efficient global workforce.
These are just some of the most beneficial aspects of converting to a more modernized way of working, such as hybrid work. Here at TechQuarters, we strive to operate in a forward thinking way, and a big part of that is optimizing our virtual meeting experience.
Three Reasons Why Virtual Meetings are Crucial to Modern Business
The way in which businesses have been operating over the last few years has largely been centred around virtual meetings. At TechQuarters, we feel that Microsoft Teams is the most all-encompassing virtual meeting experience, but there are many options out there. Below are some of the top reasons we feel that virtual meetings are essential for any business that wants to operate in more innovative ways.
Inclusivity
One of the biggest benefits of the virtual meeting experience is that it is highly inclusive. Building positive and successful relationships in business – whether it be with customers, suppliers, etc. – has always been dependent on communication. When the default was physical meetings, the logistics of engagement with professional partners was a bit more complicated, and it took longer.
Now, however, with digital communication channels, cloud platforms, and the ubiquity of high-speed internet, organisations can arrange meetings quickly and efficiently. As we mentioned before, virtual communications are not inhibited by physical logistics, and so meetings can be highly inclusive.
Efficient Interactions
Following on from the previous point, the virtual meeting experience facilitates much more efficient engagement. While most businesses have been guilty of arranging too many meetings during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is only because they are so convenient. With solutions like Microsoft Teams, there are features that allow users to create meeting agendas, arrange times that align with all participant’s schedules, and share content in a seamless, streamlined way. All of these features (and there are plenty more like them) contribute to a highly efficient model for communication and collaboration. Working on making the meeting experience within your organisation more efficient, and therefore generating more value for the time investment, is a worthwhile project for businesses.
Hybrid Collaboration
Hybrid work and business modernization, as has been stated, is all in aid of creating a more efficient, more successful organisation. At the heart of this, you have collaboration. An organisation that maintains high-quality collaboration across teams and departments can generate a lot of value. The virtual meeting experience goes hand in hand with this. For one thing, as we mentioned before, modern virtual meeting solutions are packed with features that allow you to integrate other digital tools and content that make interactions more effective.
For hybrid businesses that need to be able to bring together remote and on-premise employees, the virtual meeting experience can be integrated with physical environments. A great example of this is with smart meeting rooms that have devices like microphones, webcams, meeting consoles, and displays built into them.
