More than 200. That’s the average number of messages employees at large companies sent on Slack, according to Time Is Ltd, a productivity analysis company. These messages are supposed to make collaboration easier. However, they waste your time

Like social networks, instant messaging apps are compulsively consulted during work time (or even more) and generate stress and frustration at the thought of missing part of the conversation. The famous “Fear Of Missing Out”. And what about the teams scattered around the globe, with different time zones? 

In a constant stream of notifications and alerts, discussions take place and encourage an “always connected” culture, which often comes at the expense of productivity. The average employee is getting interrupted 50 to 60 times per day and about 80% of these interruptions are unimportant. These distractions disrupt the famous “deep work“, which requires concentration. According to Darius Foroux, a productivity blogger, our concentration decreases when we receive too much information. A University of California (Irvine) study showed that after an interruption, it takes an average of 23 minutes to re-focus on the initial task.

With Speach, you can gauge the company’s pulse without feeling drowned in information! Our asynchronous collaboration solution allows you to communicate at your own pace and track each other’s progress seamlessly.

Some companies are misusing enterprise social networks as monitoring or control tools for managers. On the employees side, it can be wrongly used as a mean of proving activity. But instant messaging apps are not intended to replace the roll-call taker. In remote work, managers prefer the culture of results to that of presenteeism. 

With Speach, there is no need to define an online status! Everyone is free to move forward at their own pace. Speach’s statistics allow you to know who watched a video and whether it was watched all the way through. People can comment on the speach and answer quizzes or polls embedded in the video. Each speach can be co-edited by several people and be subject to an approval system.

On enterprise social networks, ideas are proposed, discussed and eventually get lost in the flow of conversation. Documents and links disappear as exchanges go by. The same questions and problems resurface regularly and always require the same answers.  

And as if that wasn’t enough, last-minute requests on instant messaging apps are often raw and spontaneous, thus disconnected from their context. In short, instant messaging has many advantages, but it often results in fragmented and inferior communication. 

With Speach, you go from a flow logic to a stock logic: information is centralized in one place, organized and accessible anywhere, at any time. Employees form a collaborative internal knowledge base that allows everyone to know what they need to do and find the resources they need. 

With emojis and gifs, spontaneous exchanges on instant messaging apps help to maintain the social bond in these times of confinement. But what better than video to convey emotion and break the feeling of isolation? Body language is an important part of communication and visual cues reassure the viewer. 

In writing, the tone of a message or the formality of an e-mail can be misinterpreted. Video has the power to show things rather than try to describe them!

With Speach, you can directly comment on a presentation, record your screen and share this interactive video in just a few minutes. Speach allows you to maintain the social link while avoiding misunderstandings and misinterpretations.

In this context of remote work, companies must adapt and improve collaboration to maintain employee productivity and engagement.

We still rely too often on instantaneous exchanges, to the detriment of a communication that respects everyone’s pace.

Most of the time, remote conversations don’t need to be in real time. In this 3-point game, I will explain why asynchronous communication – i.e. offline, not real time – can give you back power over messaging and over time management (yours and that of others’!).

More often, the response time to an email does not exceed 2 minutes, according to a study conductions in 2015 by Yahoo Labs. When we receive an email or a message on Slack, we tend to give it priority over what we were doing. Yes responding to requests reactively doesn’t allow you to organize your day proactively.

This reliance on notifications and alerts encourages an “always-on” culture, which often comes at the expense of productivity. A University of California (Irvine) study showed that after an interruption, it takes an average of 23 minutes to re-focus on the initial task. These distractions punctuate the day and disrupt the “deep work” that requires concentration. And when everyone addresses their requests in a disjointed manner (without always recalling the context), it is easy to lose track! Some employees may even feel overwhelmed by constant interruption and even burn out.

I’m convinced that asynchronous communication frees you from distractions and repeated interruptions. It allows you to spend more time on value-added activities. Go from a flow logic to a stock logic: opt for a tool that centralizes and organizes information to make it accessible anywhere, anytime. Don’t be afraid to miss out on the flow of conversations and break away from the famous FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) once and for all!

In remote work, you are free to organize your day. What matters is the result. Remember: You are not required to be connected at all hours of the day and night, but to do your work in a timely manner! It is therefore your responsibility to manage your time efficiently and not spread yourself too thin.

Telephone or video conferences are often used for quick and spontaneous exchanges. Employees can easily ask questions live, have in-depth conversations and brainstorm. Synchronous communication is also suitable for “crisis” situations to deal with emergencies, discuss sensitive issues or announce strategic decisions to employees. 

But spontaneous exchanges with off the cuff reactions and feedback are not always the best option. Certain types of missions and projects require a step back, a more in-depth reflection (and therefore well-thought out responses). With synchronous communication, you consume the information at the same time as you receive it. It implies immediate responses that are not often the best. Conversely, asynchronous communication allows you to digest information, find answers, provide solutions, draw conclusions and make decisions without pressure.

Moreover, real-time communication is not recorded: Unless you have a good memory, it is better to take notes during the exchange! Recording your communication in the form of a video or voice message allows the recipient to consult it later and as many times as necessary. 

In remote work, it’s better to set up clear processes and have clear intentions. Everyone needs to know what they have to do, why they are doing it and how they should do it. Asynchronous communication allows you to think about your communication upstream by putting yourself in the recipient’s shoes. It provides a context, formulates a request, sets a deadline and makes all the necessary resources available. Rather than sending information in bits and pieces, in a fragmented way, get straight to the point! With asynchronous communication, you make the message audible and the information is received when the recipient is available (and therefore receptive). Asynchronous communication respects not only your time but also that of others!

The feeling of disconnection and loneliness can affect employees’ motivation. In these times of confinement, there is little opportunity for social interaction, synchronous communication is therefore conducive to simpler and less formal conversations. Videoconferencing replaces the “In Real Life” meeting: It alleviates the feeling of isolation and aims to re-create connection. Hearing your employees and seeing their smiling faces in their daily environment strengthens the social bond. Video reassures, brings nuance and has the power to convey emotions. The weight of words (only 7%) should be put into perspective in relation to the weight of tone (38%) and body language, which accounts for more than half of communication. To make up for the lack of everyday social interaction in the office, it is important to maintain this sense of belonging to keep employees motivated.

However, videoconferencing can easily get out of hand with technical problems of all kinds, meetings that drag on and go off on tangents, and so on. While it is indispensable in times of confinement, we must ask ourselves if it is always the best use of everyone’s time and energy.

With an asynchronous video collaboration solution, you can keep that social connection while avoiding the stress of consecutive meetings. And you don’t have to worry about time zones to collaborate with teams scattered around the globe. Short, asynchronous video communication allows you to work more efficiently without sacrificing the amount of interaction that’s essential in these confined times. 

To collaborate remotely, email is THE preferred communication channel to share information or ideas. However, it has its limits. Discover how speach, our asynchronous collaboration solution, will save you time and productivity!

To collaborate effectively, employees must be able to find the information they need quickly. With Speach, information is structured and easy to find, even months or years later. While creating a speach, you can talk and record your discussion points up to 6xs faster than you can type. Retention with video is as high as 95% in comparison to text, which is 10%.

Important information, in addition to being organized, must be accessible to your entire team. With Speach, you can confirm if your colleagues have seen your materials. Email attachments are easy to miss and we do not get instant confirmation of their review. Speach offers everyone the opportunity, wherever they are, to interact with other employees and easily access the knowledge they need. Our platform makes it possible to follow the progress of employees on a project, to know who has viewed a speach and whether it has been viewed through to the end.

Reduce back and forth communication with Speach. Who hasn’t wasted time looking for a conversation in their mailbox? Communicating via email can be tedious. With Speach, you can collaborate with your team and have instant feedback with comments, quizzes and polls. When you communicate via email, you may not get feedback for days and communication can drop off. In a speach, your collaboration notes are in one place with easy viewing for all.

Email text has its limits in expressing certain types of requests and may be interpreted differently. Video has this power to show more than the subject matter. You can read body language and cues from the speaker to connect in ways email does not allow. The speach is a short video format, structured in chapters, that allows you to comment on documents and screenshots to share clear, visual and guided “step-by-step” explanations. Forget about long emails: creating a speach will only take a few minutes and have more impact.

Collaborate remotely implies to put in place an organization that allows each employee to know what to do and how to do it, in complete autonomy. Centralizing your resources in Speach helps your colleagues achieve autonomy. Resources that are useful to your employees are gathered in one place and are accessible everytime, from any device: computer, tablet, smartphone, etc.

To share ways of working, a video’s good, but a juiced-up video is better! With a few clicks, you can annotate your video to make it more exciting for your viewers.

Are you facing the camera? Are you filming your actions using camera glasses? Or did you opt for a screencast? Regardless of your choice, there are several types of annotations that can enhance and illustrate your speech.

The most frequently used annotations are texts, but you can also insert a URL, an image, boxed text or arrows.

From a pedagogical point of view, adding an annotation makes memorizing key messages easier and also grasps the attention of the viewer. The most important aspect is finding the best type of annotation for your video.

• Text annotation is most suitable to share additional information, to add a table of contents, a title, a caption, or a list.
• Image annotation is best to illustrate your statements, to zoom in on a particular gesture or make your video more fun to watch!
• Boxed text and arrows are useful to point to an important element and focus the viewer’s attention on a specific part of the video when you show them a particular technical movement or how to use a program.
• A URL can be inserted to link to a specific website.

When an operations manager needs to demonstrate a technical procedure, text can help support the demonstration. You can also add arrows that draw attention to specific details and important information.

Annotations can help you enrich your camera-facing presentation. They are also very useful when an expert has to present a new program or application to his or her colleagues.

By adding annotations to a video, you not only make it more convincing, you also enrich the learning experience of your viewers!

There is no shortage of statistics, books, or blogs citing the negative effects of meetings. In fact there is so much literature on the subject that it might just be the most discussed topic relating to the modern workplace.

Statistics like this:

Harvard Business Review surveyed 182 senior managers in a range of industries. 65% said meetings keep them from completing their own work. 71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient. 64% said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking. 62% said meetings miss opportunities to bring their team closer together.

Or, this:

A recent study by Microsoft, America Online and Salary.com found that the average person really works only three days a week. The rest of working time was regarded as wasted, with “unproductive meetings” heading the list. Workers on average regard a third of any meeting as pointless.

Making matters worse is the fact that even if we do relate to the pain associated with meetings, we are failing to improve meeting conditions. In the last 50 years, meetings have actually increased in length and frequency to a point where executives spend an average of nearly 23 hours a week in them, up from less than 10 hours in the 60’s.

And, if all this research wasn’t bad enough, we are now being told that spending too much time in meetings may contribute to an early death. In other words, we are not just destroying our productivity, we may also be destroying ourselves.

You likely have a few meetings booked this week that may or may not relate to your role and responsibilities. Some of you might even be stuck in a meeting at this very second, and quietly from your mobile device looking for research or assurance that you aren’t the only one frustrated with your endless unproductive meetings.

So, why do we put ourselves through this if the research suggests too many meetings are bad?

Well, for the majority of us we’ve become accustomed to meetings and we rarely question them. They’ve become a continuous perfunctory series of events that most of us go along with even if we don’t quite understand why we are meeting. If Dilbert has to go to long unproductive meetings, then the rest of us have to endure them too right?

Yes, many meetings can be unproductive time wasters, but that doesn’t necessarily mean meetings should never occur. When executed correctly, meetings can produce a useful strategy and process for connecting with others, and collaborating on projects.

In other words the problem isn’t so much that we are meeting, or that we desire to meet, but rather the meetings themselves. Despite our angst and the plethora of information related to ineffective meetings, we aren’t aren’t doing much to improve them. Subsequently, we are also wasting a lot of money.

Have you ever wondered how much your meeting is costing you? Well thanks to a formula by the Harvard Business Review, you can calculate that exact cost. By factoring in the number of attendees, their salaries, and the time spent in the meeting you can determine how much your meeting is costing your workplace.

For example, a monthly department wide meeting with a duration of three hours consisting of 16 employees, can be costly. Factoring in five salaries at $40,000, 4 at $50,000, 3 at $60,000, 2 at $80,000, 1 at $110,000, 1 at $120,000, the total cost of one single meeting can be well over $2000. This equates to over $24,000 annually.

Another study by HBR in 2014, examined email schedules and concluded that one weekly executive meeting ate up 300,000 hours a year. The study also cited that meetings took up 7,000 person-hours for the executives involved, who also had to meet with unit heads to prepare for it, generating an additional 20,000 hours of meetings; those unit heads had to prepare for those meetings with team meetings (63,000 hours), and those team meetings generated numerous preparatory meetings (210,000 hours).

Assuming your meetings are engaging and productive, maybe you don’t have much to worry about. But, if your meetings fail to accomplish much, you could very well be wasting a significant amount of money.

While calculating meeting costs isn’t an exact science, and not always accurate, it does help remind us that every employee interaction has a cost associated with it. And whether we want to admit it or not, meetings impact the bottom line. The real challenge is finding a way to make the most of your team’s time when together, without having so many meetings.

If you Google the term ‘Meetings Suck’, your search results will exceed 14 pages. Or, you might even uncover ‘meeting bingo’, which is nothing more than a collection of commonly used events and phrases heard in meetings. As evidence in the meeting bingo categories, meetings are predictable, and haven’t really changed much in the last thirty years.

There are an interminable number of lists, infographics, and books you can read that give you all sorts of tips and tricks on why your meetings aren’t working and what you can do to make them better. Regardless of all of these so-called pieces of advice, I’d argue that your meeting attendees will likely continue to spend the duration of the meeting peering at their phones or tablets – pretending to take notes, or franticly trying not to fall asleep.

Why? Because you haven’t changed the actual format and structure of the meeting presentation. You might even be guilty of a phenomenon known as ‘death by PowerPoint’.

Up until recently many meeting formats were all pretty similar. They included a speaker of some sort, a topic, and were often presented through either PowerPoint or KeyNote. While these programs help visually convey a story, they fail to fully engage the attention of employees.

Those guilty of contributing to death by PowerPoint probably know exactly what I mean. Slides with too much text, ugly graphics, and reading out loud the contents to each one of those slides.

When your audience is emotionally disconnected from the content in your presentation, it’s time to rethink your presentation strategy. It’s time to really shake things up and do things radically differently in your meetings.

One of the main reasons meetings are held is to educate and inform employees about a particular topic. But what if employees could receive this knowledge on their own time, without sitting through long and unnecessary presentations? Wouldn’t this be a better use of company time and money?

By using Speach, an interactive video presentation technology employees can now receive brief and intuitive knowledge capsules. Rather than watching someone flip through long and unnecessary PowerPoint decks, the presentations can easily be created by their peers across multiple work locations.

When we examine some of the reasons why many employees despise meetings, it’s easy to see how a presentation platform like Speach address each one of the traditional meeting pain-points:

Meetings are too long: Speach aims to provide brief knowledge capsules in less than ten minutes.

Meetings are boring: Brief bursts of content gets straight to the point, without wasting time on introductions and agendas.

Meeting attendees are often late: Employees can access Speach content on their own time without waiting around for others.

Meetings don’t have clear outcomes: Because the content pieces are brief, Speach helps ensure each piece of content has a clear and definable purpose.

Meetings are uninspiring: With the right composition between video and rich media, Speach ensures your employees are never bored.

As a presentation tool, PowerPoint could be considered a classic. In companies around the world, PowerPoint is used by professionals on all levels to communicate important information through a simple slide presentation. In fact, there are over 500 million PowerPoint users, and 30 million PowerPoint presentations created each day around the world. However, just because it’s common and a “classic”, doesn’t make it the best.

Simplicity and ease of use have made PowerPoint a tool that can be leveraged by anyone, but it’s that simplicity that ends up hurting it as a presentation tool. PowerPoint has remained simple through all of its iterations, upgrades, and updates, but it fails to give people the things they need to present information to an audience effectively and efficiently. Especially now, in the age of the digital workplace, PowerPoint has fallen behind and just feels dated.

If you’re not convinced that PowerPoint isn’t as great of a presentation tool as you may think it is, here are the top 7 reasons that you should stop using it and find a different presentation tool instead.

Today, most people opt to get their daily dose of information through social media, logging on through their smartphone and scrolling through their feed to see the latest trending stories. Between Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and all the other social platforms, it’s estimated that there are over 3 billion social media users around the globe. But what is it about the social media that makes it our favorite information resource? The fact that it’s interactive. The ability for people to comment, like, share, and much more puts power in the hands of the audience, which allows them to be more involved with the information they’re seeing.

Now, put those same 3 billion social media users in a room and give them a PowerPoint presentation, the likelihood is that they’ll be disinterested and disengaged. Their ability to involve themselves in the content isn’t an option with PowerPoint, so they tune it out or shift their focus elsewhere, because a PowerPoint presentation goes one way – to the audience. There’s no collaboration, no active participation, no outlet for the audience to share their thoughts, and just no reason to actually engage with the slides. Without that interactivity, the audience just doesn’t connect and is never engaged, and the information in the presentation never makes its way into their memory.

While presenters can still try to add interactive elements to their presentations, PowerPoint makes them difficult to carry out. For example, having a question and answer section in your deck requires you to stop the flow of your presentation and call on your audience for them to share their answers one at a time. This limits the amount of participation that you get based on how much time you can spend on that section, meaning that you’ll only be engaging the small percentage of your audience that actually gets to answer. If you don’t want to put a limit on the interactivity of your presentation, you can opt for a digital presentation with Q&A functionality to get answers from your viewers, in addition to other interactive features like quizzes or comments.

Whenever you’re working with something that’s heavily visual, the design plays a very important role, which is why there are people whose entire career is just graphic design. As any graphic designer could tell you, things like text font, image sizes, colors, and even empty space can make or break a piece of visual content, such as a PowerPoint slide. The issue here is that when you’re working with PowerPoint and you don’t have any knowledge of graphic design, the effectiveness of your presentation can plummet. Bad text placement, distracting font, or jarring transitions from slide to slide can disconnect your presentation from your audience rather quickly. To make matters worse, different audiences can respond to slide design differently, making it even more difficult to create an effective presentation with PowerPoint.

Beyond excessive time spent on slide design, users also run into a time issue just making all the slides they need. For an average presentation, a user will have 1 slide for every 2 minutes of the presentation. Let’s take the example of a 1-hour training session for a new group of employees at a company. That 1-hour training presentation would have 30 slides, which could take the presenter hours to make. Also, if the creator needs to update all the slides in the presentation, they may need to go through each slide one by one to make those changes. Compare that to filming a quick, interactive video for 5 to 10 minutes that also has versioning capabilities so the creator can simply update various components of their presentation in just a few quick steps, and you’ll find that you’re wasting valuable time by choosing PowerPoint.

During a PowerPoint presentation the audience has two sources of information that are vying for their attention at all times. They can either focus on the presenter’s speech and absorb the information they’re hearing, or they can focus on the PowerPoint and absorb what that they’re seeing. If the presenter is simply reading off the slides, this split wouldn’t really be a problem, but at the same time, it makes the presence of the presenter almost pointless.

On the contrary, if the presenter is offering more information than what’s present on the slide, or the slide contains visuals that are designed to complement the presenter, the audience now has the difficult task of splitting their attention to accommodate both information sources. Without being able to focus on one source, they become less likely to retain the information that’s being presented to them. Even worse, those in the audience who chose to focus solely on either the presenter or the PowerPoint potentially miss out on a great deal of important information.

While PowerPoint is widely considered a visual tool that can enhance presentations, it more often functions as a crutch for presenters. For those who don’t have the most fine-tuned presenting skills, it’s easy for them to simply read the slides or lean too heavily on the PowerPoint to convey the information. If one gets into this habit, it can be difficult to break out of it, while also preventing them from ever improving their own presentation skills.

PowerPoint also limits the presenter’s style, since PowerPoint presentations are mostly linear, going from one slide to the next. This puts more dynamic presenting approaches off the table, as they can interrupt the PowerPoint and break the audience’s engagement. For example, if a presenter wants to show an in-person demonstration during their presentation, there’s no way to smoothly transition into it after coming from slide format. The same idea applies to a situation where an audience member asks a question about some information on past slides, as the presenter would need to cycle back through the slides to the information and question, and then cycle all the way back to where they were.

To counteract the linear restriction, companies are moving towards a more narrative structure, due to our brains being naturally hardwired to process, understand, and engage a story. It’s the same reason that Amazon’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, has banned the use of PowerPoint in company meetings. Instead, his teams spend the first 30 minutes of the meeting reading a multi-page memo with a narrative structure in order to improve learning and engagement with everyone involved.

In situations where more than one person is involved in putting together a presentation, they will also come across some roadblocks, as PowerPoint limits the ability for teammates to collaborate easily. While PowerPoint slides can be shared and edited simultaneously, essential components of efficient and effective collaboration are not taken into consideration such as task management with assigned duties and notifications, seamless access on any device, approval workflow functionality, or integration into the existing communication and collaboration structure at a company. Without these features, PowerPoint users are left to their own devices and find other ways to collaborate, taking more time and lowering the team’s overall productivity.

Creating the perfect presentation isn’t impossible, but it is extremely rare and very hard to do. That’s why it’s so important to have solutions in place that will provide the presenter with feedback and data so the presentation itself can be updated and improved for the future. Unfortunately, PowerPoint does provide an analytics dashboard, leaving the presenter with no information that they can work off of, unless they follow up with the audience directly. This makes improving the presentation, let along gauging its effectiveness, extremely difficult.

Even something as simple as a ratings and comments system can provide presenters with invaluable information that can end up transforming presentations for the better. Imagine being able to get immediate responses from your audience, rating how informative or fun your presentation was. You could even take a quick poll to see if your audience felt that the presentation itself was even necessary, which could be useful for cutting out inefficiencies in things such as corporate training programs. Comments allow you to get even more insight from your viewers, cluing you into what they didn’t like about the presentation, why, and ways that you can improve your presentation.

Out of the 500 million PowerPoint users in the world, over 120 million of those people use PowerPoint to create presentations in a business environment, which means that it’s still very likely that you currently use and may continue to use PowerPoint for your own work. However, you should know that PowerPoint is not your only choice for presentations, as there are solutions available that are better for both you and your audience that you should be aware of.

There are methods for creating more engaging presentations that are easier than putting together a deck of slides and come fully equipped with tools that will set you up for success, from security and analytics to collaboration and content management.

While PowerPoint may seem like the simple, quick solution that you can turn to when you need to give a presentation, you don’t have to look far to find something that’s much better. SpeachMe allows you to quickly create brief interactive presentations optimized for maximum impact that feature video captured on a smartphone, tablet or webcam combined with existing media and documents. Hyperlinks, screen captures, and images can also be included. Speaches consistent of 60% video and 40% rich media and can be divided into chapters. They’re easy to share and secure.

By leaving PowerPoint behind and using an interactive video presentation solution, you’re preventing yourself and the quality of your presentations, from being dragged down or remaining stagnant. Instead, you will see all the new opportunities that become available to you with other presentation solutions, taking whatever you used to do with PowerPoint, and making it flat-out better.

More and more factory workplaces are embracing technology and digital tools to enhance their work techniques, productivity, and ultimately, make their job and the workplace a better place to work.

Within the digital factory, there is always room for improvement, despite these recent advances. Management and leadership teams are constantly looking to improve knowledge sharing across all teams, departments, and aspects of the business. One simple way to increase knowledge sharing is to enhance and promote collaboration in the digital factory. Collaboration can not only foster new ideas, but it can lead to more productive employees and a higher bottom line. At Speach, we are happy to aid any factory workplace by increasing collaboration through the use of specific digital videos.

Ensure all of your employees or teammates know what is expected of them in terms of collaboration. This should always be an ongoing conversation from the moment an individual starts at your workplace. Initially, this can be shown through training videos or meetings with examples of effective collaboration between individuals, teams, or departments. With digital technology, knowledge sharing and collaboration have really never been easier, but sometimes we need to remind our teams of the collaborative tools they possess.

Even when certain jobs do not seem like they can be done collaboratively, there are ways to promote a community work environment. Firstly, ensure that everyone has a space and time to share their opinion. This is essential to knowledge sharing. Secondly, you can create a digital space to foster commentary, discussions, and more. Within the growth of industry 4.0, these digital spaces are becoming ever more important. Some jobs may focus more on the individual, however, by giving your team the space to share comments and suggestions with other teams or departments, even if it isn’t always face-to-face, you allow them to collaborate. Creating a community work environment can truly make a company thrive in industry 4.0.

At Speach, we understand that the digital factory is constantly changing, which means our ways of collaboration may need to change as well. Our state-of-the-art knowledge sharing platforms and videos can be tailored to any company and ultimately increase the amount of collaboration that occurs. Contact us at Speach to learn how we can transform your workplace to keep up with the high set standards of industry 4.0.