Unleashing The Modern Workplace

We’re living in a time where remote working, team chats, video conferencing and gifs are all part of workplace communications. CIO WaterCooler TV sat down with RingCentral’s Daniel Yin, Head of Product & Innovation. Daniel speaks about the trends driving the UCaaS market, the challenges and opportunities.

Driving factors-03’03

We see two to three key drivers, so one is employee empowerment, so this is all about businesses trying to make their employees happier, so remote working, flexible hours – basically allowing them to shape the way they work to be more productive and happier in the business. Cost savings are pretty big as well. Shrinking your physical presence down, allowing people to work remotely, to satisfy that or working in smaller offices closer to home. The challenge we see is that the shape of work has changed as a consequence of both of those things. Communications and how we respond has to change. If you can’t be face to face with your team, if you can’t share a piece of paper, have a chat, share a joke – that makes the work relationships harder. A good communications product needs to be able to fix that.

Replicating the office experience-05’10

It’s about empowering people to communicate the ways they would anyway. Giving them technologies, tools and experiences that are as much as possible able to replicate real-life communications. So things like team messaging go a long way to do that, you can be part of a team, you can post things, like files, share jokes by text format instead of being in person.

Making communications fun-06’23

The biggest challenge we find is people are not alien to these technologies and experiences. You look at WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, people these day have an innate desire and knowledge of what they want online communication to look like. We’ve got some really good consumer tools, I find it a real challenge when businesses say, ‘we find this really alien’, because I would think the majority of us have this understanding of consumer tech. So the real problems from the business world, they want the features, they want the function, being able to chat – but being able to manage that in an enterprise environment. So being able to audit, being able to control (not control the fun), being able to effectively monitor a work environment and there are stuff that’s much deeper than jokes, like bullying and harassment – real business challenges.