Bandwidth, audio quality and room assessment are the three fundamental variables on which the effectiveness of any video conference service for virtual workplaces depends
As almost everybody knows, video conferences have become one the most important components of any virtual workplace, as they contribute to enhance workforce productivity, decision making, team building and customer support. However, like any technology, video conferencing meets the expectations of business organizations only when it has been properly configured.
What are the crucial parameters of which to take care, in order to have an effective video conferencing service for your business? The answer is quite simple: they are audio and video quality, bandwidth size and room assessment. Let’s see why.
1) Audio and video quality. The more powerful the audio and video quality is, the most similar to the real world the experience of the participants to your virtual events will be. This means much, especially in terms of communication. Consider that human communication is mostly non-verbal, and a significant part of the message gets lost during its transmission through a virtual environment.
The idea behind video conferencing is exactly to preserve the contents of the exchanged messages as much as possible, so that the experience in a virtual workplace resembles the one in a real office. This decreases a lot the risks of misunderstandings and makes the virtual office a quite comfortable place where to work with consequent increases in productivity and speed.
Poor video and audio quality will inevitably make your collaborators slower (they have to make up for the loss in communication) and the virtual environment uncomfortable, with the result to loose most benefits of video conferencing.
2) Bandwidth Size. We can compare bandwidth to the capacity of a pipeline. If the pipeline is large enough, data stream fast and without obstacle; if the pipeline is too narrow, data slow down with subsequent hassles, like image overlapping and lack of synchronization.
The result is that the quality of the video becomes so poor that it is impossible to keep attending the meeting for participants. The solution usually taken by users is to fall back to text chats, with the loss of the benefits of real stream collaboration through video conferencing.
This is the reason why it is so much important to optimize the bandwidth size when your organization plans to install a video conferencing service. The operation is not complicated in itself (there are some helpful formulas available to reckon how much bandwidth is necessary), and it can be made by any technician.
3) Room Assessment. The physical place where your team stays during video conferences must be conveniently arranged, in order to avoid the participants of your video conferences some common and annoying issues like, for example, data security threatens (people that spy passwords), noise inconveniences and incorrect backgrounds. A good practice is to devote a special room to video conferencing with white walls, minimal furniture, good insolation, proper enlightening, comfortable layout and microphones and cams already adjusted, so that to minimize inconveniences.
If you are interested in virtual workplaces and their problems, you are going to find further helpful resources and posts on R-HUB`s blog at http://www.rhubcom.com