Collaboration devices play a key role in supporting employee experience, from extracting engagement data to improving hybrid meeting parity.
With the right collaboration tools, companies can help boost productivity, while facilitating teamwork and enabling cross-departmental engagement. According to Metrigy in its “Employee Experience & Workplace Engagement: 2022-23” global research study of 250 companies, these are three top values of collaboration apps.
Equally as important to creating a positive employee experience are the devices put in place to support collaborative work. Video equipment is particularly important with video meetings being so critical today for collaboration among hybrid workforces and between employees and external parties. In Metrigy’s employee experience study, most companies identified video meeting equipment, such as webcams and desktop video devices, as important to their employee experience strategies. Professional-grade headsets and earbuds are also on the list, as are more traditional devices, like speakerphones and even desk phones.
Let’s explore how to use collaboration devices to boost employee experience.
1. Use collaboration device data to understand employee behavior
Video meeting devices, like their application counterparts, can be a great source of data that companies can use to understand employee behavior. Already nearly 41% of organizations are using or planning to use data from collaboration devices to determine employee engagement, with 43% evaluating the potential, according to Metrigy’s research. From collaboration devices, companies can gather metrics such as number of hourly and daily meetings, average number of attendees per meeting, and average and total meeting duration.
To get the most out of collaboration device data, IT should work in conjunction with other business leaders, particularly HR, in pulling together this new source of data with traditional HR-oriented data sources, such as voice-of-employee surveys, for a big-picture view on employee engagement and experience.
Doing so, for example, enables companies to gain insight by correlating time spent in meetings with key business metrics. Is team productivity dropping as time spent in meetings per day increases? If productivity improvements are a key metric, then this could be problematic. On the other hand, a drop in average meeting time could signal a decrease in engagement, and that may be undesirable. Being able to see these relationships can guide decision-making.
So, don’t just collect the data — take action on it. This may seem somewhat of a no-brainer, but Metrigy research consistently shows many companies stop short on data usage. Some only collect data, while others analyze collected data, but fewer collect, analyze and take action. In the above cases, knowing there’s a potential issue isn’t enough. To address a drop in productivity, for example, companies can set policies on meeting duration, mandate breaks between meetings or institute no-meeting days.
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