How many of your customers or employees have invested in headsets? It’s a very basic necessity for an optimal user experience. It is definitely better than having someone shouting at their laptop because they can’t hear or be heard, and blaming the technology.
I’ve been working with corporate and private companies for most of my career and yet this simple necessity is often overlooked, even in these challenging and unprecedented times. It is a huge frustration for employees.
Having the meeting basics in place, providing the tools to do the job in a way that makes using technology efficient and effective, still appears to be an impossible dream for many.
I’ve recently been working with a 2,000-employee company, which, like many others, has sent people home and seems to have expected them to get on with their jobs in the same way they did in the office. This is not uncommon and it’s not for me to call them out specifically, as I see it with many companies I work with, irrespective of the pandemic.
People have been sent home to use collaboration technology and, in many cases, they’re having to adopt a technology they’ve never used before, often without being given any of the fundamentals.
When you join any collaboration technology, whether it be for personal or work reasons, it’s fair to expect a quality service that delivers everything at the click of a button. In reality, the experience is often far from quality, because people don’t respect the basics.
When talking about adoption, we often talk about the discretionary effort required by users to adopt a new technology, however in the current climate it’s become a sudden and mandatory requirement. When companies are not turning the lights on at their office or filling up the coffee machine, having fresh supplies of fruit delivered to the meeting rooms or the like, they are saving a great deal of money. Yet I don’t see any of that money being invested into improving the experience for employees who have been sent home, or indeed into educating them on where they can improve.
We can all Google how much it costs for a headset, but let’s just for argument’s sake say it’s £100 for a headset. In the case of a 2,000-employee company that’s £200K. That may sound a lot, but let’s just say each of those employees wastes 15 minutes a day by not being heard or not following a meeting. That’s 30,000 minutes a day not being productive. Now let’s put another figure in, let’s say the average wage is £30,000 per annum, about £115 a day or circa £14 per hour… so that’s over £3 a day per person wasted, or £6,000 a day across 2,000 people or £180,000 a month. Staggering huh?
Please, spend a little on the basics, it really does pay.
