Time runs fast. It was only yesterday, when we were all amazed at the idea to speak face-to-face with our friends through Skype on our pcs. Today, it has become common experience for everybody to work with a remote team through mobile video conferences. Tomorrow, we will meet our colleagues in a virtual office
In a globalized and connected world, working all together in the same physical space is impossible, as teams are composed of workers scattered throughout the five continents. Therefore, there is no option to video conferencing; this technology offers the only possible, practical solution to the problem of managing remote team. The need to keep together distant workers is probably the most important factor behind the boost that video conferencing has had during these years.
Another important new trend is the increasing use of mobiles and smartphones to participate to video conference. This new social phenomenon is strictly connected with a change in the patterns of living and working brought about by the so-called millennium generation, who is born techy and free and with a sort of natural allergy to the old economy.
Remote workers have discovered that much of the downtimes they have while travelling or waiting for the bus can be used to work or to answer the emails from the office. The gig-economy has boosted this trend even further: thousands of freelancers and digital nomads prefer working from home or some exotic resort through their iPhones and iPads to staying in the traditional office with a bossing boss around.
These changes in workers’ attitudes request a change in the technical equipment of tech enterprises. Today, video conferencing platforms must be highly integrated with multiple operative systems, so that to allow mobile owners to connect and conference-in. This is called Bring Your Own Device Policy, which means that the organization has simply to provide remote workers with a video conferencing platform, while it is up to each individual worker to equip himself with the device (laptop or smartphone it may be) to connect.
Video conferencing solutions must be then preferably web app (the so-called web conferencing technology), as there is no need to download software that way. The particularity of web apps is exactly that the software is on the browser, so that users do not have any more the pain to install software on their devices with limited memories and resources.
In conclusion, organizations have to adopt a new pattern for their remote collaboration tools that awards solutions which are web-based and highly integrated with the exiting operative systems (iOS, Android, Windows) for mobiles. This is the only way to enable a Bring Your Own Device Policy and bring on board workers independently from the technology of their devices.
If you are interested in the opportunities and challenges of virtual teams and remote collaboration, you are going to find more useful resources on R-HUB`s Blog at http://www.rhubcom.com