The Rise of Video Conferencing

Video conferencing has changed the world of work indefinitely. Since its initial inception in the early 2000s, businesses have been utilising it to connect with colleagues, clients and work collaboratively. However, mass adoption on the scale we see today was never achieved.

Fast forward to 2019 and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic – markets crashed, industries halted, and the world stood still. Businesses needed to adapt to this new segregated world and quickly.

How did they do it? Through mass adoption of video conferencing solutions!

As social distancing and facemasks became the standard, organisations needed to find a solution to not only protect staff, but also remain operational.

Video conferencing helped to achieve that through:

  • Face-to-face communication digitally: Allowing offices to remain at low capacity – enabling employees to work from home yet still maintain high degrees of communication.
  • Online collaboration: Screen sharing, live document editing, file sharing and discussion threads
Working from home

As the pandemic raged on, more and more businesses began to adopt video conferencing into their processes and daily work tasks, becoming comfortable with the application in time and more efficient as a result. This allowed entire workforces to remain at home yet still complete their daily tasks.

Employees were also no longer required to be physically in office to take part in training or meetings. Instead, organisations with the infrastructure could easily allow users to attend via their chosen video conferencing provider (Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, etc,).

As video conferencing became the new norm, it was now easier than ever to invite external users to a Teams Meeting without any hiccups or technical issues. Allowing organisations to meet with clients all over the world in a face-to-face format that still hosted all the benefits of a traditional meeting.

Video Conferencing with Presentation in meeting room

This adoption of video conferencing allows businesses to:

  • Gain a competitive advantage.
  • Operate remotely.
  • Increase productivity.
  • Reduce time and travel costs.
  • Retain employees.

During this time, organisations began to take note of these benefits associated with video conferencing becoming intertwined with work processes and company culture. Since this adaptation had already been forced upon them, rather than reverting to the old ways post COVID, many organisations chose to fully embrace the change and invest to future proof their office environments & processes around it.

Since then, Video conferencing has exploded with the market and is projected to grow from £26  billion in 2024 to £47 billion by 2032 (Fortunebusinessinsights,2024). The scale of what video conferencing equipment is available has also expanded heavily, with big brands such as Crestron, Logitech and Yealink expanding their meeting room offerings to the growing needs of organisations.

With the sheer amount of technology out there, it’s important that you discover what is right for you.

At Connect Anything we simplify this process assisting you in exploring a range of hand-picked offerings tailored to your requirements.

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