As the business landscape expands and technology advances, there’s an increasing need to engage customers and distributed teams located across the globe at scale. Online conference call and video chatting tools can facilitate one-on-one conferences. However, it fails to offer a sense of being in a real meeting.
Enter virtual reality. With it, you can transform the way you hold business meetings with staff and clients. It enables people to interact and collaborate virtually and offers a real-life experience. This gives the feel of being in one room.
Over the past 10 years, there has been an increase in remote work by 91%. Consequently, technology will now play a major role when it comes to keeping people happy and engaged while working.
Today, VR’s reputation is growing in business and this has helped in countering the dated misconceptions revolving around this technology. More businesses are realizing its potential and how it can help them grow. According to a study, the global virtual reality sector is predicted to grow to a $56.25 billion industry by the year 2025.
In this blog post. we’ll be taking a look at how this advanced VR technology will help improve your business meetings.
Why Is Virtual Reality Important For Business Meetings?
Despite the economic fallout and disruption due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the clients, partners, and employees of organizations using virtual reality may experience a rather seamless transition towards remote collaboration.
Given how things have unfolded in 2020, remote working will likely be the new norm for most businesses. Also, virtual events and meetings will be the future of B2B marketing, thanks to their convenience and benefits.
Many people have become accustomed to conducting video meetings and chats from their personal spaces. Though video conferencing is certainly a great way to host seminars, events, or communicate with your team, it lacks the ability to offer an office-like setting.
This is where VR conferencing becomes essential for business meets and teams working remotely. Why so? Virtual reality offers an inclusive and life-like experience that resembles more closely to an in-person conversation for meetings, brainstorming, whiteboarding, 3D design, data visualization, and screen-sharing.
Now let’s take a look at how virtual reality technology will help improve your business meetings:
1. Attend Regional Meetings From Your Living Room
When you’re working remotely from home and you have a regional meeting to attend, you can do so with virtual reality. Simply put on your VR headset and you’ll be able to see your colleagues in the living room.
Additionally, virtual reality can also improve your workflow. For instance, it enables the information worker to manipulate workstations and data in new exciting ways throughout infinite monitors. This makes data analysis, creation, and gathering even more speedy and seamless.
This can be particularly helpful during design meetings as it’ll help office workers, managers, and designers to validate designs, collaborate with stakeholders and clients, and ultimately, examine and finalize the design. Therefore, improving the design team’s workflow & performance.
2. Stay Connected With Remote Workers
The ability for employees to work out of their office has been feasible for decades now, however, it’s becoming the norm. Fifty percent of the workforce in the US will be remote very soon, says Forbes.
With things evolving quite rapidly, it’s important to engage face-to-face with the remote workers at least once per week. Traditional conference calls fail to offer a thorough experience or sense of a strong connection level.
Fortunately, with VR, you can hold meetings with your remote employees effectively, while giving them a sense of being in an ‘in-person’ meeting.
3. Negotiate With Global Partners From Your Workplace
Today, to be successful in the international economy, more and more startups and firms depend on a workforce that’s geographically dispersed. International growth is quite challenging for every business.
When team members belong to different nations and work all around the world, communication may start to deteriorate. Misunderstandings may emerge, which will result in cooperation degenerating into distrust.
Even video conferencing may not be much of a help anymore. Especially, in cases where you have to discuss product designs or prototypes with your team. This is where virtual reality collaboration can help.
With VR, businesses of any size will have the opportunity to work together like never before. By joining a VR session, the entire team will be able to meet and also see relevant 3D data. As such, you can negotiate more efficiently and faster with global partners, thereby helping you save on travel costs.
4. Boost Employee Productivity
As everyone interacts in a virtual space, VR meeting spaces can also help minimize distractions to employees. Most VR conferencing tools offer generic business office settings to use for meetings.
There are some that even let you devise your own unique space. Meetings are more fruitful and concise as everyone is involved in professional interaction, regardless of where they are.
Team building activities, brainstorm, and physical product demos are quite a challenge with typical video conferencing. However, in VR, you have the ability to engage with people’s avatar as it can mimic reality.
As virtual reality enables project teams to share ideas, prototypes, and documents as they would in real-time, they can collaborate and work more effectively.
5. Encourage Employee Relationships
The remote workforces of today don’t have access to the same social settings where they can gather and interact. Online software like Workplace and Slack are helpful but they can’t replace the lunchroom or breakroom as spaces where employees can come together and build relationships.
The increase of online voice chats in video games has shown that people can and actually do build long-lasting, important relationships online. According to a research, people do believe that they can form meaningful relationships and relish powerful emotional experiences virtually.
A virtual lunchroom or breakroom could be exactly what your business needs to encourage teams to become acquainted outside of deliverables and projects and be as effective as real meetings.
