Advantages and Disadvantages of Video Conferencing

By seeing and hearing each other, you can convey your messages more clearly and effectively, avoid misunderstandings, and build rapport and trust. Video conferencing also allows you to share your screen, documents, and presentations, which can improve collaboration and feedback. Microsoft Teams and Skype offer the ability for anyone communicating over text to receive text translations. For those meetings, organizations can use features offered by vendors, like Microsoft’s Azure Speech Translation services, or generative AI tools. These tools transcribe spoken words and translate them in real time for attendees to view or hear. This enables multilingual communication in meetings and captions for users who are hard of hearing.

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The web-conferencing systems enabled office workers to continue their work during the pandemic lockdowns. The systems changed communication by reducing certain aspects of communication while enhancing others. Previously compartmentalised units were connected, while connectivity between workers used to attending the same office building, but with weaker professional relations, drifted apart (Claude, Susanne and Søren). For firms with divisions in many countries, the collaboration across borders improved. Firstly, the participants’ natural descriptions and expressions are transformed into phenomenologically disadvantages of video conferencing sensitive expressions (Giorgi, 2009, p. 130). The meaning units are explored, or to use Churchill’s expression “interrogated”, to extract the intentions in relation to fellow office workers which lie beneath the articulated experiences.

Video conferencing capabilities enable employees to work remotely — whether from home, a coffee shop, a library or another location other than the office. This flexibility eliminates various time barriers, such as commute times or travel to and from conference rooms. Also, these meetings become more accessible to employees with disabilities, employees in different states or time zones and potential new hires from different locations. Many organizations have significant annual budgets for travel to conferences, other businesses and branch offices.

Collaborative work and document sharing

Video conferencing thus enables participants to escape confrontations in a competitive environment and withdraw from the challenges of human interaction at a more basic level. The mutual energy, shared sense of flow, the we indicates that collective intention is weakened when communication is mediated in video conferences. The participants label the collective intention in manners which do not explain why physical presence and direct face-to-face interaction conveys creativity. The articulations of collective creativity in terms of brainstorm, flow and we confirm that we do need bodies to convey collective creativity, but they do not explain why.

It enables power to “mask a substantial part of itself” (Foucault, 1998, p. 86). However, the transfer of power struggles to the realm of intercorporality is exactly that, which enables collaboration and avoids that rationality succumbing to power. It enables participants to give in to the better argument without losing face. Accordingly, the initial questions concentrated on descriptions of the organisation, a typical day at work before the pandemic, meetings with colleagues and clients and travel activities. The focus then shifted to the apprehension of the phenomenon, i.e. the duration of home office, the frequency and duration of video conferences and participants on video conferences.

People can just go to their local video conferencing suite, rather than get in their car or go to a train station or airport. The time that isn’t spent traveling can be used to complete other work and personal tasks. In this context, it is also important to remember that extensive WFH can deepen the gap between those who can increase their influence by being present in the office, and those who WFH and consequently have less visibility in the organisation. Granting office workers flexible work arrangements may therefore increase the very hierarchical power structures it attempts to counteract. The recognition is the reward for the ability and the willingness to contribute to certain tasks.

Overall, for people over multiple locations, video conferencing is simply a more efficient, less stressful, more productive and effective way to hold meetings. Being able to see the other people in the video conference makes it easier to pick up on subtle cues, body language, and nonverbal communication. People who can see each other when they speak are more likely to support each other and follow through on their commitments. Extensive WFH would not only curb power struggles capable of undermining rationality, but also the energy and momentum of collective as well as individual agency. At the societal level, it would reduce the contact with fellow citizens who are not part of one’s immediate sociotope.

1. Correspondingly, any articulation of management of a temporal inconsistency, i.e. of the possibility that a wish for flexibility in the work arrangement may not be coherent with the employee’s long-term interest and would come across as authoritarian.
2. Professional interaction is therefore characterised by a connectivity paradox.
3. If you want to use a video conferencing platform that will perfectly meet all your needs, you usually have to spend some money on it, because free versions do not always offer you enough features for your online-meetings.
4. The collective production of ideas thus develops faster because of the additional layer of communication at the level of intercorporeality.
5. While video might be a great medium for marketing, it needs to be acknowledged that not just any video can compete against a similar product or company that puts out quality text and images.
6. Either spontaneous agency is curbed and replaced with more rigid, and (perhaps, but not necessarily) fairer forms of interaction, or settings are created for more spontaneous agency.
7. Add in the technical issues like mute mishaps, poor internet connections, and unexpected computer glitches, and it can feel like you’re in the middle of a virtual tornado.

While conference calls were available back then, they were not as effective as live video conferencing services are today. Video conferencing tools save the company a lot of time and resources by providing a cheaper and more effective way of communicating. With the increasing cost on travelling,many companies have to turn to a cost effective alternative,especially for those big companies who have many branch offices across the country or across the world. It is a huge burden for them to spend on travelling who need to frequently have meetings relating to employees and other company affairs. The appearance of video conferencing make it possible for you to have a collaborative conservation online with others anytime,anywhere. Video conferencing system can be used to host video meetings,online training,webinars and video presentations in various industries such as enterprise,government,education,training,healthcare,law,finance,military,community and etc.

1. However, even after thorough training, people will need days or even weeks to get used to the new mode of communication.
2. Training others on what to do and who to refer to when technical issues occur is necessary since these issues can disrupt important negotiations, exams, and quizzes.
3. Also, these meetings become more accessible to employees with disabilities, employees in different states or time zones and potential new hires from different locations.
4. It conveys creativity and renders superficial and functional relations existentially relevant.
5. Employees could also collaborate and work on shared documents together in real time or through screen sharing.
6. It is possible to learn unique skills and get exposed to diverse cultures and opinions without spending anything on travel.

Rather than being forced to sit through a live virtual meeting, participants can watch the video when it is convenient for them. However, organising meetings between teams in different time zones can be challenging. Remote teams split across various time zones present a new organisational problem that many companies face. This issue has led businesses to provide their employees with unprecedented levels of flexibility and freedom. With hybrid and fully remote models now more established than ever, employees are more satisfied with flexible working conditions. This flexibility improves overall job satisfaction and, as studies show, enhances employee retention and productivity.

1.1 Transformation of the descriptions of proximity into phenomenologically sensitive expressions.

Work affects individuals’ sense of identity at a fundamental level (Honneth, 1995; Arendt, 2018; Honneth, 2023). A substantial increase in WFH will affect the role of work in the lives of office workers at a fundamental level, but it holds the risks of a professional, existential and societal nature. Professional interaction enables the individual to leave home and participate in formal processes of public life. A significant decrease in direct contact with fellow citizens can weaken the role of work as key to participation in public life and the experience of oneself as participating in society.

Maintaining social relationships is crucial, and using online meeting software can diminish social contact, making relationships feel dry. Online meetings make it easy to share digital copies of important documents and presentations, ensuring everyone has access to the same information in real-time. Face-to-face meetings often require paying for meeting rooms and refreshments, which is not needed for online meetings.

Working with people around the world is amazing in terms of exchanging valuable experience and sharing various points of view, but sometimes it can be really hard. You don’t have to worry about booking conference halls for your meetings anymore because gathering 100 or more people in a couple of clicks is really easy. Online meetings help HRs quickly find suitable candidates for vacancies and conduct remote interviews, saving time.

The need for proximity manifests the unarticulated longing for closeness to fellow human beings also in unpersonal and superficial relations. The impersonal collaboration of professional interaction, which focuses on solving practical tasks, satisfies an existential need for human beings to participate in society. In the second intentionality, the impersonal collaboration is amplified into collective creativity. If it is the intention of participants to engage in collective creativity, then the process is weakened by the transfer from direct interaction to video-mediated interaction. Intercorporeality therefore manifests in the intentionalities of office workers as an additional level of communication, which can tacitly convey power struggles.