5 types of remote collaboration for your business needs

Remote collaboration has empowered businesses to effortlessly connect face-to-face with people from anywhere in the world, on any device. The usage of these solutions exploded in recent years and is considered an essential tool for all enterprises today. Nearly 80% of workers are using collaboration tools for work in 2021, up from just over half of workers in 2019, according to the Gartner, Inc. Digital Worker Experience Survey¹—an increase of 44% since the pandemic began.

What is remote collaboration?

In remote collaboration, geographical distance is removed as a barrier to teamwork. It facilitates communication and productivity among dispersed teams, regardless of their location or device.

Chances are you’ve used video this week to connect with coworkers, clients or a potential customer. But are you aware of the different types of remote collaboration intended for specific needs? Here we’ll explore the five most common use cases and explain which tool is best suited for your business.

1. Large company-wide meetings

1. From time to time, businesses need to check in with all of their employees as a way to share goals, assess progress and recognize challenges, achievements and opportunities. While company-wide meetings—otherwise known as “all-hands” or “town halls”—were traditionally held in large physical spaces, it’s now more typical for these meetings to take place online in order to accommodate offices with multiple locations and hybrid work environments.

1. For these types of meetings, we’d recommend a unified collaboration tool that securely allows for a larger number of people to join video, audio or web conferences from any phone, computer or mobile device.

2. Webinars and large broadcasts

1. Virtual events became the norm when in-person and travel restrictions were in place last year, and still remain a prevailing way to securely connect industries worldwide. While virtual events can’t duplicate everything about an in-person experience, the benefits of webinars—including affordability, convenience, increasing sales enablement and brand awareness—cannot be ignored.

1. If webinars and large broadcasts are in your future, search for a robust and secure solution, like our all-in-one OfficeSuite HD Meeting^®, that allows you to manage speakers and up to 10,000 participants with robust webinar features like live polling, moderated chat and post-call surveys.

3. External meetings

1. Putting your best foot forward is vital when conducting external meetings with clients or prospects. Fostering relationships face-to-face makes it easier to build mutual trust, capture the nuances of customer needs and ensure productive partnerships. For this type of collaboration, you’ll need a reliable all-in-one solution that supports high-quality video and audio conferencing to make it easy to invite participants, share content and function equally well on desktop and mobile devices.

4. Internal or department meetings

1. Keeping your teams organized, motivated and up-to-speed is the most common purpose of an internal meeting. These collaborative gatherings build a cooperative environment for any workforce by making sure that coworkers can easily come together to carry out action items and resolve any questions and concerns. The emphasis for internal video tools is likely to be on functionality, so an effortless collaboration solution with a dependable, secure meeting space is enough to get the job done.

5. One-on-one conversations and interviews

1. Perhaps the most intimate way to use virtual collaboration solutions is through one-on-one meetings. This format helps to manage remote employees, conduct performance reviews and allows for working sessions between coworkers both effectively and confidentially.

1. In addition, this format is a cost-effective way to conduct a first-round interview with potential employees, saving time and travel costs. A meeting platform like OfficeSuite Live works to enable seamless and secure virtual collaboration for voice, video and content sharing—making it an ideal solution for companies in need of an accessible on-demand solution that establishes sessions between colleagues or prospects from any device.

Reach out to learn more

Need more support determining the best remote collaboration tools for your business? Experts at Windstream Enterprise are here to help. Contact us today to modernize your communications and find the best solutions that fit your needs.

References

1. Gartner, “Technology to Support Collaboration for a Hybrid Workforce.” August 25, 2021.