The coronavirus pandemic has completely changed the way businesses operate around the world. Through working from home and various social and physical distancing measure that have been put in place, businesses have had to implement new strategies in order to adapt to these trying times.
Before the pandemic it was common practice for businesses and their employees to organise, hold and attend hundreds of in person meetings. These were seen as the best, most effective way for employees, internal and external stakeholders to collaborate, present and share ideas with one another. Although effective these meetings could coincide with various expenses, especially if employees were required to travel interstate or overseas in order to attend.
However once the various social distancing measure were put in place, businesses were forced to find other means through which they could collaborate both internally and externally. The resounding solution which has been seen used across a plethora of businesses are video conference meetings, also referred to as ‘Zoom’ or ‘Teams’ meetings.
These online or virtual meetings allow colleagues and stakeholders to interact, collaborate, present and share ideas and documents simultaneously and in real time. In many ways these online meetings allow you to do everything an in-person meeting would, especially given the improvements and progression being seen within the software, giving them more and more capabilities. It also cuts out various aforementioned expenses that are associated with in-person meetings through eliminating the need to travel.
This video conferencing software not only allows businesses to conduct meetings remotely, but in conjunction with other necessary equipment, also means they can effectively set up their employees to work completely from home.
This opens up the possibilities for businesses to downsize their office space by either allowing more people to work from home full time, or deploy a rotation system where only a portion of the employees are coming into the office at a given time.
This again will allow businesses to cut office space and related expenses which they can then reinvest in other areas of the business.
These shifts would not have been properly considered unless COVID had forced company leaders to shift from dated yet familiar working mentalities. Previously it was thought that working from home would coincide with a significant drop in productivity. However, studies have shown that working from home actually leads to increased productivity due to an increased perception of responsibility.
Moving forward, through the pandemic and beyond it, it will be interesting to examine how businesses conduct day to day operations. Whether they will go back to the methods they used before COVID, or will they continue to implement and grow from the new measure put in place for the time being?
