The most successful people schedule their time. However, some items in schedules can get in the way of important tasks. For some people reducing the number of meetings and emails helps to declutter schedules. Whether you are strictly on billable time or not we all want to be productive and add value. Unnecessary meetings and replying to communications that shouldn’t have been emails get in the way.

Rather than broadcasting our message at the point of conception we often wait to schedule a meeting. This means we wait for a conversation to happen and the moment has passed. If we do communicate thoughts immediately via email authenticity and meaning is lost.

Already we see people using video conferencing as a new way to communicate more effectively and reducing travel. Video combats global warning and reducing our carbon footprint can only be a good thing. Of course you’ve still got to schedule these video conference calls. 

Conference calls quite often are recorded and sometimes without knowledge of the participants. In a webinar situation recording is accepted but often run of the mill meetings are recorded. Greater transparency about recording is needed. The benefits of recording is a searchable archive similar to email. This helps us to recall and remember prior conversations. Lots of households have Alexa and Google home devices are listening in and whilst there are privacy concerns most people have come to accept these devices.

Now when you are in a video conference call sometimes they’re cancelled because people forget to turn up and other times people are late and had you waiting around for at least five minutes until people join. All of this is wasteful of time. Another point is that video conference calls tend to last half an hour or sometimes an hour. This doesn’t mean that the conversation isn’t important and that you shouldn’t have one hour video conferences! There will be times when a half an hour video call can be replaced with something more efficient of time. We all know as a meeting becomes longer attentions wain. 

Combining asynchronous communication with video allows for a more personable communication that doesn’t need to be scheduled. Whilst these videos are not live the recipient gets to choose when they play the video. Undoubtedly some users will play the videos shortly after every recording and others will wait a few hours. This allows a greater flexibility around schedules.

For businesses there are a multitude of videos you could post. It could be an appraisal video with evidence to your manager on what you’re learning what you’re achieving. This sort of video diary will be able to be played back by not only your manager but you yourself.

You might be a coach or mentor developing a member of staff. If your staff are remote it can be a challenge after a face-to-face meeting to keep in contact. Again asynchronous video can help keep relationships and conversations going.

You might have just won some new business and want to personally thank a customer for the contract award. Why not send a video? Not only can you thank customers but video can be a fabulous way to praise staff for going the extra mile whether that is in a private direct message or on a company wide timeline.

When you look at the most popular Internet platforms at the moment video is a common ingredient. For entertainment there is prime and Netflix. Kids prefer YouTube and TikTok. Lots of young people use Instagram stories and we are all sharing videos on WhatsApp.

Video isn’t going away. Transcribed videos with ability to quickly recall key information makes the corporate intranet much more appealing. When it comes to knowledge transfer be it handovers or for new starters video screen casts showing and telling how software is used increases time to competency.

The world of business is heading towards self service. If you’re travelling abroad you check in online yourself, in the supermarket there is now self checkout. When it comes to business communications there will always be face-to-face communications for building relationships. Video messages are there to supplement communications for “between times” to improve your productivity (avoiding a meeting) and to increase richness of communication (videos beat email for authenticity). With more people working from home and people being conscious of their carbon footprint video might just be the answer. Less scheduling, less travel, greater productivity without compromising relationships.

You can learn more about video and artificial intelligence at the below link:

Knowledge Sharing with Watch and Learn

Our brand mantra is to ‘Stretch Beyond’ it seems fitting that our recent management strategic away day was held in the Polish and Czech Republic mountains.

Getting away from the office and into tranquillity to look back on where the business is now and on where we will be in the future was a great idea from our COO Michal who has a house set in the mountains.

One bit of advice for business success is to change your environment regularly. Travelling up ski cable cars to some of Southern Poland’s highest peaks certainly gave us all a different perspective on the business.

Clearly the weather was too hot for the snow that would form on the mountains during ski season but nevertheless it made for good walking and we made it to the Polish Czech Republic border at the summit.

Climbing a metal tower and looking towards Poland, the Czech Republic and into Slovakia on a wonderfully clear day got me thinking about stretching beyond.

From our Leeds headquarters office it is approximately 900 miles to Katowice as the crow flies. Our Chicago office is 3000 miles away from basecamp!

The Internet and mobile phone changes the game on where and how you can work. With all the big mobile operators now charging the same as they do back home in the UK the cost of doing business abroad has fallen yet again.

Although it’s not great being away from a young family FaceTime, Skype and Google hangouts give you a level of comfort that you’re only really a stones throw away from loved ones.

To round off what was a perfect number of days of strategic planning our flight in Katowice got cancelled. Thankfully we were re-rooted via Kraków to Leeds Bradford airport and arrived only half a day late back in the UK.

All in all it was great to meet is the senior leadership team in the mountains as we prepare to climb our next mountain!

Early in February saw Webanywhere exhibit at London Olympia for Learning Technologies 2017. I have to admit the stand was the best designed yet and I was very proud to see some of the logos displayed of blue chip clients which we have grown over the years.

It was great to take one of our key customer UCLH to dinner and to socialise with the Workplace Learning team. This year we not only  talked about our and platform solutions but also about content services. Our Head of Learning Design Stuart Dyson had flown in from Katowice after missing his plane! Stuart was able to showcase some of the examples of our work and demonstrate our capabilities. Webanywhere now has instructional designers dotted across the globe in Chicago, Leeds and Katowice.

Webanywhere decided to offer content services a few years ago. In our experience platforms without content don’t get used. Content which talks to the LMS allows you to leverage big data for the learner, the teacher and the manager. You can then track people’s learning and use this feedback to enhance your online courses.

We now offer content to all our customers and this enhances the learner experience providing value for money on the implementation of your learning management systems.

As they use to say at my first job as youngster starting out content is king! And it most certainly is!

 

If you over deliver in business customers keep coming back. This is something Webanywhere strives to provide through our “Stretch Beyond” mantra – we don’t just want to meet expectations, we want to exceed them by going the extra mile.

Having a “WOW” customer experience means delivering small acts of kindness and making everyone feel especially important. Webanywhere focuses on 4 main areas to ensure our customer experience is second to none.

We endeavour to deliver great service to our customers. All phone calls have to be answered within 20 seconds and we allow our staff to talk to customers for as long as is needed – however long the customer is comfortable with. As long as they’re happy we don’t care. We don’t use customer care scripts and instead trust our staff to deliver a personalised experience to each customer.

We surprise customers by including product features and extra services they just don’t expect. This might be as simple as a hand written thank-you note or perhaps free usage of one of our software apps – this is our way of saying thank-you.

Having knowledgeable staff on the end of the phone is very important, and as a learning company we encourage our staff to become learning animals. Our own internal LMS (based on the same Totara packages we provide to clients) ensures that new staff are well-trained in our company policies, products and processes. We like to front-load the staff training so we don’t damage the customer experience further down the track. Every time a task is cleared in our CRM we ask customers to rate the task and give feedback. This data is then used for further training and process improvements. There is always room for improvement when it comes to the quality of our service.

Speed equals value and, in an increasing digital world and with the speed of the internet, people are becoming less and less patient. Our engineers understand this and create software and websites which load quickly, saving you time. We have strict service-level agreements that we measure and manage in order to address support tickets and customer change-requests in a timely fashion. When customers log issues we call them back straight away in order to guarantee that we understand their requirements and that progress updates are forthcoming.

Our philosophy is “WAW WOW Customers” – Webanywhere WOWs Customers – and we exemplify this in everything we do!