10 Reasons Why Video Is Surpassing Chat as a Key Collaboration Tool

Often the best ideas come to people outside the conference room. Inspiration doesn’t care about your schedule. It will appear in the break room, on a coffee run, even over the weekend. But as the workforce becomes more distributed, teams are losing these casual opportunities to connect. Digital connection, primarily via chat, has proved to be the next best thing. As the innovation cycle gets shorter every day, companies are pushing for faster, more efficient ways to enhance workplace collaboration. However, when chat is combined with video, true collaboration can happen. This slideshow, using industry information from Steve Goldsmith, General Manager at Atlassian HipChat, offers 10 reasons why video is now the focal point of enterprise collaboration.

Video takes advantage of our most natural form of communication—human speech. Talking will always be faster than typing.

While chat is effective for quick communication, the fastest way to actually accomplish tasks is by talking it out. Collaboration is messy and includes a lot of back-and-forth, but video helps get everyone on the same page in minutes.

Group discussion often revolves around a document or visual. Video’s live screen sharing feature helps teammates collaborate in real time.

According to Global Workplace Analytics, 3.7 million employees work from home at least half of the time. The workforce is growing increasingly distributed, especially for technical personnel. Video serves as a bridge between remote workers, allowing them to connect across cities, countries and time zones.

When video is integrated into a chat platform, collaboration can occur where the action is already happening. There’s no need to switch platforms, circulate a dial-in and deal with faulty access codes.

For cross-office teams who don’t see each other in person often, video face time is the next best thing. Co-workers who feel connected generally thrive in a cohesive working environment and positive company culture.

Video can be accessed anywhere, anytime. Unlike chat, video can also be used hands-free while in-transit.

Instead of spending copious amounts of money flying clients and employees across the country to meet in-person, companies can use videoconferencing as an inexpensive and reliable way to communicate, no matter the location.

With emails, chats and text messages constantly coming in, distraction is almost inevitable during conference calls. Seeing teammates face-to-face over video encourages more engaging conversation and helps teams stay focused on the task at hand.

A recent study by Atlassian found that 73 percent of Americans are distracted doing other work while on conference calls and 39 percent admitted to falling asleep during audio-only conference calls. Video helps teams stay engaged and enables teammates to feed off each other, for more focused, dynamic and productive conversation.