Although 85 of employees use video as part of their everyday lives today, only 28 percent say their employers are proactively encouraging them to use video at work to communicate. 72 percent feel that live video has the power to transform the way they communicate at work and 69 percent believe that increased use of video conversations would help employee retention at all levels within the organisation.  

The research, conducted amongst 4,000 employees across the UK, Germany, France and the US, also found that only one in seven (14 percent) employers is good at providing communications tools at work which mirror those employees use at home. Almost two thirds (63 percent) assert that their employers could make better use of live video, pointing to culture, collaboration and training as examples. Furthermore, 63 percent say that younger employees now expect to use live video as a communications tool when they enter the workplace. James Campanini VP & GM EMEA, BlueJeans Network commented “Millennials communicate in real-time and use video and photographs in all aspects of their lives – they are the ‘selfie-generation’ who are comfortable on screen and sharing experiences with their friends and colleagues. It’s clear from our research that some businesses are failing to recognise that the way their staff want to interact and collaborate is changing in line with this.” 

The research from BlueJeans Network also found: Talent magnet: 51 percent said they would prefer to work for a company that embraces live video as a way to communicate and 73 percent believe hiring of new staff could be transformed with video, changing relationships between employers and candidates as well as between bosses and employees at a cultural level (75 percent). Lust for live: 72 percent of employees admit they have higher expectations of information being readily available than they did two years ago and 82 percent see live video playing a useful role within their organisation over the next two years whether in training, troubleshooting customer issues or product collaboration. 

Transforming meetings and inboxes: Seeing people rather than just hearing them is seen as a key benefit of video communication (60 percent). Furthermore, 68 percent see live video saving time spent in unproductive, long face-to-face meetings in the next five years whilst over half (54 percent) see it significantly reducing the volume of email traffic. “Western business culture is changing to become more informal and personal, driven by new technologies. If the last business communications revolution was about the written word and email, the next one is about video and seeing people. It’s not that hard for employees to imagine a working day where every meeting, phone call or email becomes a live video chat,” concluded Campanini. “As consumers we’ve adapted to running our lives in a real-time way using video as well as written words, now it’s the turn of businesses to embrace technology and cultures that let us do the same at work.” 

The findings show that more employees in the UK are calling for more use of live video than their counterparts in Germany, France and the US. 59 percent of respondents in the UK agreed that they would prefer to work for a company that invested in high quality video collaboration. This is higher than the US (53 percent), France (48 percent) and Germany (46 percent). A higher percentage of UK employees also agree that collaboration with colleagues will become much more enjoyable through live video (65 percent), younger employees are expecting live video as a communications tool (66 percent) and that live video will save time spent in face-to-face meetings (73 percent).