This challenge has been more difficult for me. My organization is a very large and complex one that has many different and complex businesses within it. We are a very risk adverse organization with low turnover so many people have been in place for a long time and can be resistant to doing things differently. In addition, our industry is heavily regulated so some communication tools such as Google Drive and comments live during a web-ex session are banned.
One area that my colleague Gina and I decided to pursue in effective communications across geographies. The company is based in Minneapolis with large centers in Boston, New York, Green Bay, Detroit, Las Vegas, Phoenix, London and Mumbai. Gina works out of the Las Vegas office and if often the one struggling with bad phone based approaches for meetings across geographies. Despite having an international and disperse workforce our communication tools across these geographies lag way behind other organizations. Most meetings are held with basic conference call technology which creates a very sub-standard experience for those joining on the phone. The phones do no have powerful microphones so conversations are very hard to follow with 6-10 people (or more) in a conference room and others joining by phone. The people on the phone often cannot hear over the rustling of paper, typing on keyboards and people talking over each other. Over 80% of the meeting rooms have only basic conference call capabilities.
Gina has complimented me several times (including sending me formal recognition notes) on my conference call management. I enforce one person speaking at a time and require any comments to be made directly into the microphone so all meeting participants can hear the conversation. I require that facilitators repeat questions to ensure those on the phone can hear them clearly and I purposefully call on the phone based participants to play an active role in the discussion.
Gina and I have introduced Adobe Connect and Web-ex with video to further improve the communications between locations. We have set up large video conferences with web-ex for file sharing and separate breakout phone lines for phone based participants to participate in small group work. These are behind the times basics that we are barely effective at using currently.
The resistance we receive to even these basic approaches to improving the communications experience across geographies is profound. People in the meeting in person don't want to be bothered with having to accomodate those on the phone and are not appreciative of the cost of not effectively engaging others.
We experimented with using FaceTime with iPads to include people in meetings and that was effective for those willing to try it. People had to be willing to use their personal iPad initially but with some success more people are having work acquire their's for them. This brings the person in to the room and allows them to more fully participate at the table with others. We have also looked into "robot" technologies that allow you to mount an iPad on a robot type of thing so that you can have mobility to move around the workplace. We have only read about this but we are eager to move forward and bring forward ideas that will measurably improve our engagement across geographies.
The organization is now piloting Skype for Business which will greatly improve our ability to communicate effectively with other locations and should improve communications immediately. We will continue to research and understand improved communications approaches and bring them forward. And in the meantime Gina and I will continue to force people to talk into the microphone, speak on person at a time and we will occasionally bring in an iPad to see each other during a meeting. And we will continue to research options and best practices to "innovate" which for us means catching up to what everyone else was doing 5 years ago!
No comments:
Post a Comment