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By Sara Jameson
Establishing reliable communication channels throughout an organization is a necessary mandate for effective collaboration across working groups, committees, departments, and business units. CIOs today strive to deliver the proper collaboration tools to support these initiatives.
According to recent research by Aberdeen Research, as of 9/2011 approximately 60% of the C-Suite at fortune 1000 companies actively use video collaboration tools between members of the C-Suite to coordinate the management of their departments in the organization.
Because of the globalization of corporations, business executives are required to work more virtually than ever before. In spite of this fact these executives continue to highly regard the value of face-to-face meetings and interactions.
These findings were highlighted recently according to Cisco's London-based Economist Intelligence Unit in a new survey showing that business leaders, despite their global distribution, want more collaboration in person.
This was especially true when it comes to activities such as brainstorming for new ideas, managing a specific crisis or making presentations to internal staff or external partners or customers.
The survey is titled "Business Leaders' Views on Interaction. Approximately 860 global senior executives were asked to describe their preferred communications with colleagues, suppliers/partners and customers.
The survey results demonstrated that 89% say communications where the parties can see and respond to each other benefit internal business functions such as employee coaching and training, as well as communications with partners and customers.
Other key highlights from the survey found:
• 75 % believe in-person collaboration is critical;
• 54 % agree that gauging engagement and focus is critical to communicating; and
• 82 % felt they were better understood after in-person encounters.
Top Motivations for In-Person Meetings
The No. 1 reason to have a face-to-face meeting is to resolve major problems more efficiently. That is followed by generating long-term relationships and resolving a problem or creating an opportunity quickly.
• Effective Communications: Executives cited engagement and focus on shared content (92%), tone of voice (81%), facial expressions (81%), words someone is using (72%), subconscious body language (72%) and conscious movements or gestures (67%) as being key to successful communications. According to the survey results, four out of these six cannot be achieved without face-to-face interaction.
• Business Processes: Business leaders responded that in-person collaboration is key for more than 50% of key strategic and tactical business processes. This includes events such as project kick-offs, initial meetings, brainstorming sessions, managing problems with groups, crisis management and coaching team members. All of these events were identified as having a "high need" for in-person collaboration. Also cited as needing face-to-face interaction were contract renewals, strategic planning, meeting new clients, co-development of project plans and contract agreements or expansions.
• Technology: While 60% of modern communications are non-real-time, 73% of business leaders believe in-person is the most impactful communication. Additionally, a majority of executives say in-person has a higher impact than email, phone or web conference when it comes to interacting with customers (79%), colleagues (72%) and partners/suppliers (66%).
• Telepresence: When in-person meetings aren't feasible, videoconferencing may be a good substitute, as many executives strongly agree that video enables richer and more productive relationships (53%), saves time (45%) and saves money (35%).
Published by myITview.com
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