Workplace Collaboration is Changing Dramatically – Findings from avsnet’s Roundtable

Our roundtable with Polycom was a fascinating look at the modern workplace. Throughout the morning, we kept returning to the same question: what’s the best way to drive collaboration across an organisation?

The answer is unique to each company. Businesses must find a way to unify the ‘technology islands’ within their organisations, simplify workflows and ensure interoperability is at the core of every new investment.

It also requires a healthy dose of self-reflection. Businesses need to look inwardly and assess how current collaboration strategies are performing.

This is why our roundtable was so useful – it offered an honest platform for attendees to swap advice on what’s working and which areas they need help improving.

New Generations, Similar Challenges

Polycom, our co-host, was just as open and explained how the company has adapted its business model to meet customer expectations.

Polycom’s Ray McGroarty explored some of the trends prompting this change, including the scale of collaboration deployments, the boom in cloud adoption and how people are becoming more comfortable with video.

We then provided actionable advice on how to cope with the latest generation entering the workplace.

Younger employees are completely comfortable with technology and expect the same user experience as they had at school and university. One way of working might suit a senior manager but be completely unsuitable for someone who’s grown up using Skype and social media.

Collaboration Means Different Things to Everyone

The session’s key takeaway? Identify collaboration tools that can truly drive productivity, not hinder business efficiency. Take a long hard look at your business and ask, do we address collaboration across the entire organisation? What’s our strategy to do so?

Once the answers were out in the open, we moved on to the ingredients for workplace success. In our next blog, we will delve deeper into these ingredients, explore the advice shared by attendees and our own strategies to improve collaboration.