One of the most important business decisions you could make this decade is to deploy a visual communications (VC) solution. I’m not saying this because my company offers solutions and services in this area, I’ve seen and experienced how effective VC can be – when done right – in reducing costs, saving time and improving productivity.
It’s transformed my working life, which used to involve almost constant travelling around Europe and to South Africa; giving me at least 80 extra hours (that’s 10 working days) back per quarter to get things done rather than be in transit. It’s also meant I spend less time in the early hours or late at night sitting in airports.
Last year alone my European management team saved 20 percent of their travel budget due to the implementation of a VC solution. Cost savings like this meant our VC project realised a return on investment (ROI) in just two months. Further, our employees have reported a significant increase in productivity and an improved work/life balance.

Looking for better returns
You don’t have to look hard to find a financial ROI for VC. For example take an organisation with 1,000 employees who travel, and let’s estimate that they each spend a minimum of £50 a month on travel and travelled for two hours per month on average. This amounts to a staggering £600,000 per year and a grand total of 3,000 days spent travelling. Any reduction in travel time and costs in this realistic example results in significant savings and productivity improvements very quickly.
First-hand experience has shown me that VC can provide hard financial business benefits, along with numerous soft benefits, while enabling employees to maintain close, effective relations with colleagues and customers around the world. An example of a soft benefit relating to me is that I have a small VC unit installed at home. This means I can now have early morning or late evening conferences with Asia, Australia or North America without having to be in the office at very unsocial hours. I can’t tell you the benefit that has brought to me.
VC is not a substitute for human interaction, and hopefully never will be. I haven’t become a hermit through using VC: I still visit my country managers once a quarter – rather than every month – and my relations with them are just as positive, and productive, as before. Similarly my trips to South Africa have been reduced thanks to VC. I still go, just not as often.

Now is the hour for visual communications
But first, for those sceptics out there: it’s true that VC has been heralded for some time as the next great business tool, yet only recently started to take off. You may have under-utilised VC systems sequestered in a room somewhere in your organisation, or you may remember the fear of trying to set up a VC, or blurred images and meetings descending into farce. The good news is that things have changed, especially with respect to the technology involved.
Also, with the advent of consumer-focused products such as Skype, more people are using VC at home, and are more open and able to use it in a work environment. We found that this significantly speeds up the realisation of benefits. In short, VC has finally arrived.

Picturing what VC could do for your business
VC can be split into four areas:
– Telepresence, which provides a fully immersive experience through high-definition video, multiple reactive cameras and ambient lighting.
– High definition video conferencing, for in-room group conferences.
– Personal desk-top video conferencing for interactive, one-on-one meetings.
– Video conferencing on a mobile or laptop, for a mobile workforce.
To determine the right VC solution and service for your business, we found that the best approach was to take a few steps back. Making sensible decisions about which of the above to purchase and deploy requires that a business knows what it needs, which in turn requires that someone has thought about how VC would be used. This means considering how the business meets.
It’s an obvious thing to look at, but sometimes even businesses with a VC system haven’t thought about how they meet. Ask yourself, as we did, what is the ‘meeting culture’ of your organisation? Is flying to meetings a perk or necessity? What would the impact be of stopping or reducing it? These questions naturally lead to clarification of the potential use and benefits achieved utilising VC within the business.
When developing a VC strategy it is important to note that VC isn’t appropriate for all interactions, and is one of a wide variety of communication technologies at your disposal. While global board meetings might justify a telepresence suite, this shouldn’t be at the expense of all face-to-face meetings. VC is not an all or nothing technology and ideally it should make up part of an overall unified communications strategy. You use it when and where it’s appropriate.

Make sure you’ve got IT right
Once VC requirements are set, your IT team will need to assess the technical requirements of each aspect of the system, and cross-reference them against current IT infrastructure. To ensure quality, the state of the network will need assessing as it will have an impact on planning and designing the solution, as well as its performance. Further, if a dedicated room is required it will need to be designed and decorated to tight specifications, especially in the case of a telepresence suite. With any room dedicated to VC, physical factors such as adequate air-conditioning and room size will have to be taken into account. In this case, a supplier who also has specialist capabilities in the audio-visual design area will be necessary.

Gain end-user buy-in
Getting a critical mass of end-users to use the system is key to the success of VC. Although the usability and intuitiveness of VC has dramatically improved – it’s as easy as making a phone call nowadays – users will need simple and easy methods for guidance on the use of VC tools to ensure buy in and adoption. Providing a simple, user-friendly interface and operating procedure will help generate acceptance, but you should still create an IT help point and offer some training on the system for employees. This may take the form of an ongoing training programme, availability of a user guide and even in some cases, such as with a telepresence suite, the provisioning of a concierge service to support the continued use of these tools.
Training and I admit a little coercion may be needed. People are apprehensive of using VC at first, and when we put travel restrictions in place this past year some were slow to take up VC. We provided training and now you have to book early to get access to a VC unit.  People are certainly happy spending less time on trains, motorways or in airports, they now know it’s easy to set up and it’s been adopted across the region.

The vision of VC
Whether you’re new to VC or have a system in place, the approaches outlined above apply. As I found, there are many ways to enhance your current system and get more from the initial investment.
For us, we first looked at VC as part of our environmental strategy, but then cost reduction became the big driver and now we have benefited in both those areas as well as in productivity improvements. You may ask will VC adoption tail off as the market improves? I believe adoption will continue to grow regardless, and we’ll see VC become as common as a phone call. Hard benefits notwithstanding, once people use VC and it changes their working (and home) life for the better, like me, they will be loathe to return to the past.