Modern Collaboration Tech Is Better Than Ever

Freed says that the organization continues to unlock new capabilities in its Webex environment. Through Webex Control Hub, the IT team can troubleshoot, administer and manage the platform, quickly hunting down the source of audio or video lags. Employees are increasingly using Webex transcription, and the company is investigating a feature that sends voicemail transcripts to employees’ email accounts.

“The technology has proved itself to the point that the adoption and use has been mostly grassroots-driven,” Freed says. “People have really seen the benefit of it.”

While nearly all organizations have adopted collaboration technology, business and IT leaders must focus on the people aspect of collaboration in order to optimize their environments, says Wayne Kurtzman, research vice president for social, communities and collaboration at IDC.

“The biggest complaint that I hear is people reading on one channel and responding in another,” says Kurtzman. “That breaks up the power of collaboration.”

Outside of the financial industry, few may have heard of the global firm Broadridge Financial Solutions. But the company manages proxy votes for investors, processes trades and may even be in charge of printing and mailing your monthly cellphone bill.

So, it is vital that Broadridge’s collaboration systems continue to seamlessly connect employees, managers and external stakeholders, even in times of turmoil, says Jonathan Belfiore, the company’s director of unified communications architecture. Broadridge leverages both Cisco Webex and Microsoft Teams. While Teams supports the firm’s internal meetings and messaging, the company also maintains more than 100 conference rooms outfitted with Webex Room devices.

“We’ve always had a hybrid work model,” Belfiore says. The rise of remote work “showed that our investments had paid off, because our systems never went down. We didn’t skip a beat.”

Click the banner below to learn how to upgrade to Wi-Fi 6E and future-proof your networks.

Kurtzman suggests that companies set up “collaboration councils” that include stakeholders from across the organization to normalize expectations and codify collaboration culture. “That mentoring and modeling facilitates teamwork at a much greater level,” he says.

At Broadridge, collaboration is fueling effective remote and hybrid work models and connecting far-flung teams. The company’s Webex conference rooms have hosted 15,000 meetings in the past year alone, and Belfiore says that the technology has led to seamless collaboration between in-person and remote workers, something that has been a sticking point at companies with less robust collaboration environments.

“Webex makes it very easy,” Belfiore says. “It always shows everybody in the room. Also, we’ve gotten to a point where the room automatically turns on. People just go up to the screen and tap the picture of the meeting type they’re joining. It keeps it very simple.”

“You’ll never replace the in-person human interaction,” Belfiore adds. “But what you can do is make it as easy and inclusive as possible.”

Broadridge’s collaboration tools have even helped support mergers, which are more common in the financial services industry than in most others.

Cumbersome technology can sometimes create friction during mergers, Belfiore notes, but he says that Teams and Webex help new employees to “hit the ground running” while also optimizing costs for the company.

“The last thing you want people to worry about is whether or not the technology is going to work,” he says. “Rather than forcing them to use technologies that make them feel excluded, you want to make their lives easier. Webex and Teams help us fill that gap.”

GO FURTHER: Learn to optimize the employee experience during hybrid meetings. 

Collaboration Tech Helps Companies Manage Rapid Growth

Over the past year, Basys, a nationwide payment solutions company based in Kansas, has grown its employee headcount by 50 percent, to 180 people. Most of these employees are in the office at least one or two days per week, but not everyone is in at the same time, and Microsoft Teams has helped existing and new workers to forge connections and work together productively, says Basys President Edwin Martin.

“Teams allows employees to meet people that they wouldn’t have necessarily met before,” Martin says. “To be successful here, you need to like working with other people. We have a culture of talking to people and asking for help. Teams has made that a lot easier.”

Another benefit, Martin says, is that Teams has helped Basys to consolidate much of its collaboration environment onto a single platform. Previously, the company was using one solution for email, another for persistent chat and still another for videoconferencing. “We had to maintain multiple different licenses, and that just wasn’t optimal,” Martin says. “We don’t have a huge IT shop, so trying to manage all of that overhead was really quite difficult. With Teams, we have a one-stop shop.”

Where Teams really shines is in enabling business outcomes, such as improved training sessions that lead to increased sales, Martin says. Previously, outside sales representatives sometimes had difficulty understanding the nuances of new product offerings. With Teams, sales staff can remotely attend demonstrations to see exactly what the features do.

“Instead of just telling them that we have a new invoice tool, we can actually show them how it works,” he says. “We can show them why it’s valuable to our customers.”