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Give Unified Communications a chance!

Mark Leigh, President APAC, Jabra

Mark Leigh, President APAC, Jabra

The headset market is growing fast. A big reason for that is the growth of Unified Communications.

You might be aware of the key benefits which come along with UC adoption, like ROI on technology and increased innovation through better sharing of ideas. What you might not know is that the best thing that UC brings to organizations is the ability to build a more collaborative work culture.

‘Strategy is great – but good culture eats strategy for breakfast’. The change in corporate culture is phenomenal if UC is properly deployed. It can change the way people interact with each other.

UC significantly differs from the other types of organization software.

Let me give you 3 Reasons why you should give UC a Chance:

Collaboration and Community

With UC, people will have the tools and be enticed to collaborate more. The mobile worker, the desk bound spread across offices will all be on equal footing to work together more cohesively. With seamless interaction, UC helps to strengthen bonds in the office and builds communities within the organization. Different teams can interact through video conferencing and instant messaging daily. This frequent and timely interaction will help bring employees closer.

Strategy

The best strategy might not be impactful without the right culture. With UC, leaders will have a much better opportunity of getting the company culture in line to support strategies. It gave our company a chance to create a common purpose and motivate each other through collaboration, direct messaging, and video conferencing.

People

Daily interaction using UC builds trust, not because of the equipment, but because of the communication and contact your employees will experience both internally and externally. It will help them in strengthening relationships and when groups of people with similar interest come together, companies will find themselves closer to the next innovation just by adopting UC.

It makes sense in a modern organization to cut costs on telephony, manage disbursed teams, and get all the benefits that the software offers. Today modern companies built entire people strategies around the existence of UC, by hiring the right person for the role, considering geography as secondary criteria. With the current war on talent it requires employers to be flexible about work location.

However, like all other significant changes, a successful UC deployment takes courage, leadership, a ton of planning, and a good 360° view of the organization. People don’t necessarily want to change the way they use the telephone, so asking them to do so, even with the promise of improved collaboration and performance that a UC deployment entails, is sometimes not enough.

So what does a leader do to ensure the use of UC in their organization?

Here is my number one piece of advice; make a point out of using UC yourself and ask your leadership team to do the same.

You need to lead by example, take an hour a week in the roll out phase where you make yourself available through UC to your direct reports, or anyone in the company if that is what it takes, and ask your management team do the same. Also, insist all internal meetings leverage the UC system.

Finally - Keep it simple!

Today, in my own organization, we often have our meetings using UC even though all participants are in the same building, because it is easy and a whole lot quicker to do it that way. Nobody has to book a conference room, and meetings tend to be shorter. When we are finished working and the chit chat is over, we are done! I find that we cut approximately ten to 15 minutes from UC meetings.

I hope you will take the plunge – you will not regret it.