It’s 5:30 am…on my 51st birthday…and I’m in a Delta Sky Club about to begin the long tiring trek to our Manila office. I’ve been waiting for our weekly leadership call to begin…everyone is running late for our call which is scheduled for 5:30 am EST/5:30 PM Manila. I am the only one on time and ready to begin.
As my patience wanes, the digital clock on my MacBook Air reads 5:52 am. Where is my staff and why are they ALL so late!?! Then Skype begins to ring and I click the green video camcorder icon, with what I am sure is a slightly perturbed look on my face. In an instant, my face brightens into a broad smile as I am surprised to see a handful of our employees filling the Skype room and gathered around a birthday cake. Wow! The power of video conferencing!
NarraSoft is the offshore outsourcing company I started seven years ago, and we have been using Skype to communicate from the beginning. We still have a couple of clients who have a conference call culture, but all of our other clients communicate with their respective NarraSoft teams via video connection…usually Skype and sometimes Google Hangouts. And it is easy to see why. Humans communicate better, faster, clearer, happier and way more effectively when the sense of sight is added to the equation.
I can honestly say that the CAPEX required to build our Skype room has been the best expenditure over the past three years!