When dealing with collaboration and driving production, three elements hold the keys to success; communication is important at all levels of a company, interaction serves as a vehicle for inspiration and brainstorming and employee engagement ensures you have the dedication to see projects through to fruition. The separation of these three elements of companies cause employees and partners to suffer from a lack of engagement, bouncing from one “workplace” to another without a clear idea of who or what they’re reaching out to. While technology has driven forward the tools to communicate with nearly anyone in any part of the world, sometimes a loss of focus on engagement can endanger the smooth operations and employee dedication your teams once experienced.
Video conferencing first brought consumers engagement in the form of seeing the faces of their fellows on computer screens and has since added to the offerings for engagement in a number of ways. Because engagement is so important to clear communication, it’s no surprise that the telecom industry is focusing more of their energies on engagement than ever before.
What is Engagement?
Before you can understand the correlation between communication and engagement, you must first understand what the individual components are. Communication should be simple to understand if you are a veteran of the corporate world, but engagement often gets misunderstood or left by the wayside as unimportant, which is selling short one of the key elements of successful communication before you’ve even gotten to that point.
Engagement is a measure of the level of commitment your audience, partners or employees have to your ideas or company. It can be a difficult force to get a read on and there is a lot of misinformation about what constitutes engagements. Let’s briefly take a look at what engagement is not:
• Engagement is not a measure of happiness.
• Engagement is not a measure of satisfaction.
Employees that are engaged are committed to their jobs whether they are specifically happy with them and in spite of satisfaction levels. Employees can be both engaged and happy or satisfied, but they can also be dissatisfied or unhappy and still have a high level of engagement in their jobs. Focus areas such as collaboration and productivity depend more on employee engagement than their levels of satisfaction with their job, though that’s not to say that those aspects are not important to the overall experience your employees may desire or require to keep your company functioning.
Where Communication and Engagement Intersect
Communication and Engagement are both importance aspects of the video conferencing world. Today’s technology has elevated the corporate meeting room to a stage that can accommodate any number of people, space notwithstanding, but in order to successfully host or participate in such a conference, you must have communication and engagement in equal measure and where these two important elements meet is in interaction.
More than just asking for introductions during a conference, interaction happens at all levels of a conference, just as it would if individuals were situated in the same room. Body language, participation, activities designed to seek out audience opinion and file-sharing collaborations can all be utilized to increase the interaction of audience members or participants with presenters and moderators. Offering the ability for participants to not only listen to information, but work with it and form their own conclusions, agreements and dissenting opinions not only allows for successful communication in both directions, but has been shown to increase retention of information and allow people to associate with conceptions emotionally, thus increasing their engagement to projects, ideas or upcoming changes.
Why Focus on Interactions?
Tools designed by teleconferencing companies like the interactive video conferencing BlueJeans provide to corporations and small business groups new and innovative ways for partners and employees to interact, collaborate and communicate and provide countless ways for individuals to feel as though they are contributing and being heard, thus increasing their level of commitment to the products or ideas their company is working to push forward.
Video conferencing initially lost face when it came to allowing for interaction over the web. While participants could speak to one another and see one another, information flow was hampered by the inability for individuals to touch information, to edit it on the go or collaborate to form new ideas. Technology has continued to speed forward, however, and the result is that file-sharing capabilities, text, voice and video communications and a wide range of multi-point access, private conferencing “rooms” and a variety of other protocols are now in place that let corporations focus on all three important aspects of collaboration—Communication, Engagement and the all-powerful Interaction—to drive productivity and lower attrition.
Conclusions
At the end of the day, corporations choose what areas of productivity deserve their attention and there are many opportunities to drive their employees and partners forward, but for those looking for low-cost solutions that provide long-term benefits, it’s important to focus on interaction and engagement within your teams and between them at all levels.
