“Real talk” time: Have you ever had a sneaking suspicion that your company’s top dogs really, really like to see themselves in front of the mirror? How about the camera?
You’re wrong.
They want YOU to see THEM, and for better or worse, they believe you need to see them live.
Effective communication, those business executives are calling it. “Very effective” or “Somewhat effective,” they rated it; or, 78 percent of them polled did anyways. And, as the recent White Paper from Wainhouse Research, Executive Visions on Video in the Workplace, turned tangible your sneaking suspicion, it also illustrates perhaps the single greatest frustration I hear in the corporate world:
“The uppers in my company have no clue what is or isn’t important to my daily work. They can’t relate to what tools I really need day to day. Their priorities* are not mine.”
*Daily, live video conferencing falls among those priorities. According to the report, among all of the study’s 1,007 respondents, 72 percent preferred live video versus on-demand. Keep that in mind as we dive into another key statistic below.
Thanks to a single, broken-out statistic, this disconnect between corporate world’s top and lower tiers is brought to light in stark fashion.
The higher up the executive, the greater the percentage of those (within each rank) who see online video as “Very Effective.” And, as the graphic shows, it isn’t a small difference in opinion between those at the associate level compared to C-Level employees. In fact, as you can see, it’s only at the top level where the majority of the group believes online video is “very effective.”
So, to recap: Live video is more important than on-demand; C-Level executives find using live video in the corporate environment “very important” at a much higher level than other levels below them — and the importance level drops off at a quick rate as you head south through exec titles.
Commissioned by streaming video platform company Ustream, the White Paper is designed to prove the importance of live video conferencing in the daily work environment. The numbers given in the report back this assertion, but if you’re like me, you like to believe numbers are flexible and can support just about anything you need them to. It doesn’t make those numbers incorrect, but it makes me cautious. This is especially true in the corporate setting, of which I’ve been a part.
So, when top-level folks believe something is important and vital to a company — rightly or wrongly — the rest get to make do. In other words, if you’re not among those who voted (or wouldn’t have) for “very effective” because you use e-mail, the phone, social media and/or actually still enjoy real face-to-face interaction and get up from your desk once in awhile, or you’re already loaded down with other time-consuming tasks, tough luck.
It’s time to clear your overcrowded work calendar and start accepting your C-Level’s invite for daily live video conferences because if they’re going to spend the cash to implement such services, they want you to see them.
You can view the entire White Paper here: Wainhouse1_FINAL.
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