29 Mar Collaboration Standards Help Make Teams More Effective

The right collaboration technology can deliver real business benefits by improving communication, streamlining workflows and enhancing decision-making. In many organizations, however, workers are using so many different collaboration tools that they have the opposite effect.
A recent survey conducted by CITE Research found that the average knowledge worker uses four separate team collaboration applications. More than two-thirds (68 percent) said they navigate between these apps as often as every six minutes, wasting up to an hour of work time each day. Seventy percent said these apps generate so much real-time communication that they actually make it challenging to get work done.

How did we come to this state of affairs? Collaboration technology has become a necessity for today’s geographically dispersed teams, and a number of cloud-based services have entered the market to address this need. Users can adopt them with a few clicks, often at little or no cost. Over time, teams will come to prefer a particular platform or app simply because they are familiar with it.

But when the various teams throughout the organization use different tools, it becomes difficult to even start a conversation with one another. There’s no way to bridge these solutions with a single user interface or share information among the various platforms. People wind up switching among multiple apps just to communicate with different groups.

That’s why organizations should establish standards for conferencing and collaboration technologies. Standards save money, reduce downtime and increase productivity by enabling a consistent user experience. However, if users are already familiar with cloud-based collaboration tools, this can create a dilemma when fitting out larger spaces.

Those facilities need multiple cameras to create a more “lifelike” experience, an adequate number of microphones to cover all meeting participants, and high-quality speakers that enable everyone to hear what is said. Users need the ability to launch a videoconference from their own devices and integrate digital whiteboards and other tools into the conversation. Most importantly, they need an integrated way to manage all of the equipment with an intuitive user interface that makes the whole process simple.

With Q-SYS Connected Meeting Room Integration from QSC, organizations can deliver a high-quality user experience when using “soft codec” collaboration tools in larger rooms. The solution enables endpoints running cloud-based collaboration apps to easily interface with Q-SYS audio and conferencing equipment without additional hardware or device drivers.

The solution leverage QSC’s ecosystem of networked audio and video components that can scale from the smallest huddle room to the largest all-hands meeting space. By standardizing on the QSC platform, organizations can greatly reduce the time and cost associated with procuring and integrating hardware and software from different manufacturers.

Collaboration tools are supposed to foster teamwork and improve workflows, but the proliferation of conferencing and collaboration apps is making the process overly complex. The problem only gets worse when organizations need to implement collaboration solutions in conference rooms. The natural tendency is to go with the familiar cloud-based tools that users have implemented on their desktops, but those apps lack the robust features needed for training rooms and larger meeting spaces.