Communications and collaboration solutions

Video Transcript: Thriving in the era of hybrid work

Question: Why are collaboration and communication solutions so important?

Michael McCracken: “Collaboration and communication solutions are very important to our customers because of employee engagement. It really does come down to engaging that employee. According to a 2023 Gallup Poll, only one-third of employees are actually engaged in the workforce. That means two-thirds of employees are not fully engaged. We're not getting the productivity we need out of them and we also risk losing them as employees. And typically when you go to replace an employee it costs one and a half to two times that employee's annual salary. If you figure an employee making $100,000, you're talking $150,000 to $200,000 to replace that employee.”

Question: After the pandemic, isn’t everyone already set up for hybrid working?

Michael McCracken: “You think that after the pandemic everybody would be set up for hybrid work, but what we're really finding is that we did a great job of setting them up to work remotely. What we didn't do such a great job with was setting up the work environment to welcome people back to the office. What I mean by that is if you look at most of the conference rooms, what you're finding is that they're set up for audio meetings, they're not necessarily set up for video meetings. And even the ones that were set up for video meetings were set up for basic video. They weren't really set up to have remote users as part of that experience. So, what we're doing now is retrofitting those environments to make them inclusive no matter whether you're in the office or you’re remote.”

Question: How does SHI make recommendations on the right vendor products and solutions?

Michael McCracken: “When SHI is working with our customers to figure out what the right solution is going to be for them, we don't just look at what the market pundits are saying. We're not just looking at what Gartner or Forrester might say as far as the best solution for a given technology. Instead, we're really looking at what that customer is looking to do and make sure that we're taking into account their requirements, not the requirements that one of these big rating agencies may have put forth. And by doing so we're able to come up with a solution that makes the most sense for that customer.”

Question: What is SHI’s approach?

Michael McCracken: “When SHI works with our customers to understand their needs for a communication and collaboration solution, we first start by looking at their requirements — making sure that we really understand their requirements because a lot of times our customers don't even understand the requirements completely.

At that point, we'll look at the different solution providers that we will typically talk to our customers about and choose two or three of those that make the most sense for that customer, provide a solution based on those two to three customers, and then work with the customer to refine that down to a single solution that's going to make sense for them. We’ll typically talk to them about professional services they may want to add and potentially even training they may want to add to that solution.

And then finally, we'll look at what types of ancillary effects there are going to be from implementing that solution. If you're going to add video to conference rooms that traditionally just had audio, we now need to think about what are the effects going to be on the customer's network for adding the video traffic across that network. The last thing we want to do is implement a video solution that cannot be supported by the rest of the customer's environment.”