For many businesses, acquiring and retaining top talent has never seemed more difficult. Although the rise of remote working allows you to hire staff from all over the world, this larger talent pool can often make it much harder to pick out and identify the best candidates for the role. In addition, your competitors will also be implementing these diverse recruitment tactics, offering an array of benefits in an attempt to entice the best employees to join their organisation.

When the competition for talent is so fierce, there’s little wonder as to why employee turnover rates are growing in the UK. However, keeping hold of your star performers isn’t just a case of serving up unimportant perks, because an overall lack of engagement with the company is often found to be an employee’s main reason for leaving.

Why is Employee Engagement Important?

When you fail to provide employees with a sense of purpose or continuous development, they’ll soon start to feel disconnected and disenchanted with your organisation. Once that happens, it won’t be long until they’re re-entering the job market in search of a more fulfilling (or better paid) position elsewhere. Of course, such high turnover rates will inevitably damage your productivity and profitability.

Perhaps most alarmingly of all, a 2017 study from Gallup reports that as many as 87% of the world’s employees feel unengaged at work, while a more recent study from Cascade HR found that 40% of HR professionals cite employee retention as their biggest challenge. This is particularly challenging when it comes to remote employees, since their detachment from other team members could potentially leave them feeling isolated and unsupported.

Fortunately, modern visual collaboration tools are allowing business to improve the engagement of not only remote workers, but every other employee working for their organisation. But how?

How Video Collaboration Technology Can Increase Employee Engagement

Video technology now plays an integral role in every modern business, with innovative conferencing solutions making it easier for teams to connect. When you combine this with the advent of digital whiteboarding, virtual workspaces and smart room technology, these tools can undoubtedly help to improve the engagement of your employees.

Simplify Collaboration

When employees feel like part of a team, they’ll inevitably begin to feel more engaged with projects, colleagues and, more importantly, your organisation as a whole. However, working around schedules and booking out adequate meeting spaces can often make it harder for teams to regularly work face-to-face.

Additionally, long distances and lengthy travel delays make life increasingly difficult for remote workers, potentially leading to those damaging feelings of detachment. However, video technology allows workers to collaborate at a time and place that best suits them, bringing teams much closer together and helping them react quickly to urgent situations.

Reducing the amount of wasted time and improving efficiency, these simplified collaboration platforms ensure teams can work together regularly and effectively. By keeping workers and departments so seamlessly connected, they’ll undoubtedly feel more engaged with your organisation.

A More Productive Meeting Experience

Late last year, a European survey found that UK workers waste an average of 13 days a year in unproductive meetings, with a significant number of those polled also admitting to actively avoiding these inefficient sessions. Not only does the sheer amount of wasted time cost businesses a fortune, but it also leads to a completely unengaging meeting experience.

The modern employee needs to feel motivated and driven, with an emphasis on more interactive and activity-based meetings instead of those monotonous one-way presentations. Through video conferencing, teams can share, edit and annotate files in real-time, ensuring meetings become much more collaborative, creative and, above all, engaging.

In fact, according to a study by RingCentral Glip, almost two-thirds of workers aged 18-34 feel motivated by video meetings, while research from Owl Labs shows that 90% of professionals believe this technology actually improves the effectiveness of teams.

Improve Working Relationships

Video technology will undoubtedly improve communication between management and individual employees, while also making it easier for remote teams to get to know each other much better. Strong working relationships have always been essential towards employee retention and engagement, and the convenient face-to-face interaction of video conferencing can always help to improve morale, productivity and the overall sense of teamwork.

Instead of leaving employees feeling isolated and disenchanted with your business, video technology can help to forge tight-knit teams that can work together from different places and spaces. By offering a more collaborative and flexible working environment, you’ll significantly strengthen the bond employees have with your business.