Much has been made of videoconferencing technology used for international meetings between senior executives but little has been said about human resources professionals using conferencing services to facilitate communications within their organisations.

In fact, HR pioneers in some enterprises are exploiting videoconferencing to drive efficiency and cost savings across their organisation.

Cathy Ham, General Manager, Portfolio and Marketing, BT Conferencing

Videoconferencing, or visual collaboration, has developed rapidly since its early business use in the 1980s. Until the late nineties, videoconferencing was an expensive investment and was frequently reserved for senior executives to hold meetings with their counterparts across the globe. Times have changed since then, with superior technology and lower prices enabling many different departments and even small enterprises to adopt videoconferencing as a means of inter- or intra-company collaboration.

The use of conferencing has often been limited by the imagination of the executives who invest in it, with a large proportion of companies continuing to use it only for high-level meetings across their organisation. In certain companies, however, the HR department is pioneering new uses of videoconferencing technology to facilitate their daily activities and better achieve their objectives.

Main benefits for videoconferencing

There are four main areas in which HR departments are exploiting videoconferencing: to facilitate meetings between disparate individuals, to assist in the recruitment of staff, to deliver employee training and corporate messaging in an efficient way.

Tom Buttle, former HR executive with one of the world’s largest international oil and gas companies says, “On a weekly basis we had to communicate with our support staff in Bangkok, share policies with our counterparts across Europe and report activities back to the US. Conducting these meetings over the phone or by email on an individual basis led to a lack of cohesion and wasted time as information was repeated between different people. Obviously it would be difficult, not to mention costly, to travel to these meetings each week so videoconferencing provides a viable alternative.”

Running meetings via videoconferencing can save a lot of time and trouble as well as cutting the cost and environmental impact of travelling to meetings but it isn’t the only way to utilise this collaboration service. Many HR departments, particularly those within larger or internationally dispersed enterprises, interview potential candidates via videoconferencing facilities.

Interviewing

Aaron McCormack, CEO of BT Conferencing, finds that the best way of interviewing a tight pool of candidates for a senior position is to do so by videoconference. This has only been made possible with the advances in technology since the turn of the 21st century. He comments, “The limitations of yesterday’s technologies meant that, even if the people you were meeting were relatively near at hand, the quality of the image wasn’t that good and you were constantly aware of all the mechanics involved. Now, whatever the distance, their presence is so life-like it is possible to actually make eye contact with them, get a genuine sense of their personality and, if you ask a tricky question, even see beads of sweat on their forehead.”

Flying interviewees to the company head office on the company expenses is no longer necessary and in fact, in the current climate where candidates are scrutinising their potential employer’s carbon footprint, may even cause some brand damage.

Group training

The delivery of group training can often be challenging for HR, particularly when it is a standard induction course for a geographically diverse group of employees such as new graduates. Common practice has been to centralise the training at a headquarters or specialist training location, or alternatively send the trainer to each company site. The first method can be costly, requiring the department to pay for travel and accommodation for each attendee, whilst the second is a very inefficient use of the trainer’s time.

Some innovative HR departments are delivering standard training to multiple personnel at once, using a combination of video and web conferencing tools. All that is required for this is that each employee has his or her own computer or access to a videoconferencing suite and the trainer can manage the course as if everyone is in the same room. When web conferencing is added to the mix, trainers can share documents, host question and answer sessions, and run Powerpoint presentations on the screen – reinforcing the learning experience. Not forcing anyone to travel for the training promotes productivity and reduces costs, while time is saved by running the course only once.

Major announcements

A similar approach is being employed by a number of HR professionals to disseminate corporate information. Historically, major company information is distributed via email or sometimes a news video is posted on the company intranet. However, for some announcements such as major organisational changes affecting a particular part of the business, it is important that the messages are delivered interactively. Asking an appropriate spokesperson to visit each employee location to deliver the message personally may be expensive and unproductive, but use of videoconferencing can provide the same result without the wasted time and money.

Jeanne Barrett, Global Head of Human Resources at BT Conferencing based in the UK, uses this approach to deliver information to employees in the UK, Americas and Asia/Pacific region from senior executives based in Boston.

“We’re fortunate to have unlimited access to videoconferencing facilities as it’s the nature of our business,” says Jeanne. “We frequently use videoconferencing to run team working workshops across continents which help us align global plans and resources around projects. Also, when major news hits that we want to celebrate with the employees, we hold a videoconferencing session between the employees at our London office and other offices around the world.”

BT’s recent acquisition of Wire One in the US was an example of this. “On the day of the acquisition announcement, we held a 13 site videoconference enabling the CEO and other senior leaders to share the news personally throughout the company,” Jeanne adds. “We find that this method makes all our employees feel valued. It really transmits the enthusiasm and keeps the excitement high across the organisation.”

Reducing cost and carbon footprint

Using videoconferencing instead of face-to-face contact is practical for a multitude of HR purposes. It is enabling pioneering departments to save money on travel, reduce the organisation’s carbon footprint and increase productivity by saving employee time on travel or multiple instances of the same meeting. It will only be a matter of time before the benefits of videoconferencing are experienced by almost every organisation and each passing week new uses for the technology are found. HR departments are in many respects leading UK business in driving cost and efficiency savings through videoconferencing and it may be that they end up demonstrating to the rest of their organisation exactly what can be achieved.