Being able to properly communicate is a critical aspect of every part of your life.
Whether you’re working in the middle of the business world, working your way up the ranks in the education sector, or just trying to improve your personal life, having access to proper communication tools is a huge boon.
While you may imagine proper communication tools to mean a phone or a computer to send emails, there is a newer, more effective solution easily available today: video conferencing.
While video conferencing technology has been available for many decades, it’s only become widespread within the past decade thanks to improving Internet technology and vastly reduced prices. Even so, there are probably some of you out there that don’t think you need to use video conferencing at all.
Perhaps you think your phone is just fine, or sending texts and emails accomplishes the same job. While you are technically correct, there are a number of reasons you should adopt video conferencing as one of your new communication tools, no matter what facet of life you need it for.
Face-to-Face Communication
One of the greatest benefits of video conferencing technology is its ability to provide people the means to communicate face-to-face without the need to actually meet in person. While nothing can truly replace the engagement and focus provided by an in person meeting, video conferencing provides a wonderful alternative that is much more inexpensive.
The actual cost of a face-to-face meeting can vary greatly depending on the situation. If all attendees are in the same city, the only real costs involved are time and gas, and perhaps a meal at a restaurant. But if the meeting is between people on different continents, then the price of that meeting just skyrocketed.
There are actually a lot more costs that go into a face-to-face meeting than you might imagine. Overstock discusses how video conferencing can completely negate hotel costs, plane and train fares, per diem purchases, and many more.
Face-to-face communication is superior to voice only for multiple reasons, but the most critical is that of non-verbal communication. Body language and facial expression are incredibly important to human communication, whether in business, education, or your personal life. In fact, according to Ubiquity, up to 93 percent of the meaning in communication can come from non-verbal means.
That percentage doesn’t mean that the actual words spoken mean very little, it means that body language and tone of voice can have a significant impact on how a particular phrase or word are interpreted. Video conferencing allows all parties to be privy to this additional communication information, which in turn allows for a better understanding of whatever message is being communicated.
Efficiency and Time Management
As you can imagine, with reduced travel comes an increase in time saved. If you don’t need to spend a day flying across the world for a meeting, you can instead spend that day being productive and working.
Video conferencing services like Blue Jeans Online Video Conferencing provides an unprecedented level of convenience to those that use it. Lunarpages discusses a number of reasons why video conferencing can vastly improve your productivity and time management through features like document sharing, adding multiple users with the click of a button, and the ability to host multiple meetings across the globe in a single day.
If you didn’t have video conferencing and had to meet with someone from Germany, Japan, and South Africa, that could easily add up to a week of travel and wasted time; but with video conferencing, you can meet with the people you need and come to important decisions in as little as an hour.
Collaboration and Stress Relief
You’ve probably never thought about the stress involved with communication as the two subjects aren’t stereotypically thought of being connected. However, the fact is that communication and the issues involved with staying up to date can have an effect on your stress levels.
Whether you’re worrying about when you’ll get another update on a project or from a family member, or you’re concerned over miscommunication and misinterpreting something, stress levels can increase if you aren’t comfortable with your means of communication.
Using video conferencing can help alleviate that stress while simultaneously increasing your ability to easily collaborate with other people. In fact, according to Inc. the top three benefits of video conferencing besides reducing travel costs are improving teamwork, productivity and decision making.
Being able to work together with people seamlessly while avoiding decision-making deadlocks are excellent ways to vastly reduce the level of stress you may suffer from. There’s nothing better for your stress levels than making quantifiable progress on whatever you’re working on.
Video conferencing is an easily accessible tool today that can be useful at work, at home, or at school. Whether you’re trying to work with other departments at work on a big project, trying to figure out the best way to progress in your experiments at school, or just trying to stay in touch with loved ones across the globe, video conferencing is an inexpensive, effective solution.
