Study: Good corporate culture ensures high productivity

The results on the global study "Productivity at work: The Fuze Communications Index" is available. It shows that the latest technologies help companies increase productivity by enabling a comprehensive change in work culture.

For the study, "Productivity at Work: The Fuze Communications Index," Fuze analyzed global metadata on the use of its communications platform. The data is from January 2018 to February 2019 and relates to the use of the Fuze platform by more than 5 million users from Germany, Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, India, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. A total of 2.5 million (online) meetings, 20 million phone calls and 33 million chat messages were included in the analysis.

The study shows that differences in the workforce are reflected in different preferences for communication and collaboration. By understanding their employees' preferences, companies can offer their employees the right solutions. In doing so, they create a work environment for their employees that fosters collaboration.

A key finding of the study is that meetings with video (videoconferencing) and screen sharing increase employee engagement. It also improves meeting effectiveness by reducing opportunities for multitasking, a proven productivity killer. When video or screen sharing is used during a meeting, participants stay in the meeting for an average of 87 percent of the meeting time. Without screen sharing, the figure was just 75 percent. With an average meeting time of 38.7

minutes in Europe, this increase in engagement means an additional 4.6 minutes of engagement.

"Our research shows that today's leaders not only have a responsibility to invest in technology that increases engagement," said Roland Lunck, regional vice president, Germany, at Fuze. "They are also well advised to implement integrative policies that ensure the company culture is aligned with the collaboration solutions they deploy. Executives of large enterprises need an understanding of the differences between their employees. This enables them to inspire all employees to work as effectively and productively as possible, anywhere, anytime."

The study also shows how technology can improve communication and collaboration processes and increase employee productivity. The key data and findings are:

• International meeting productivity: On average, meetings with members from one country last 19 minutes, but when team members from another country join the meeting, the meeting duration doubles to 38 minutes. With four or more countries, the meeting duration triples to 57 minutes. Meeting duration should therefore increase for each additional country added to allow for maximum productivity. In addition, organizations should consider changing calendar settings to 25 or 50 minutes. This helps ensure that meetings start on time because it gives employees time to get from one meeting to another.
• Engaging distributed teams: Meetings with video and screen sharing increase engagement, but are only used by 23 percent of users worldwide. There is potential here for companies to shape a meeting culture that improves employee engagement and productivity.

"Technology is having a big impact on our work lives," says Roopam Jain, Industry Director, Connected Work Practice at Frost & Sullivan. "It also impacts the customer experience and will continue to impact the workforce. Similarly, it will impact employee preferences and desires for flexible work arrangements. Technology leaders must invest now in workplace innovation and redesign to support tomorrow's distributed, dynamic workforce that expands as needed. This will require unprecedented connectivity and world-class user experiences to keep engagement and productivity high."

For this study, global Fuze meeting data from one year (2018) consisting of scheduled meetings (both ad-hoc and regular) were analyzed. In addition, the characteristics of phone calls, messages, and meetings of Fuze users from three months (December 2018 to February 2019) in which a user participated in at least one call and one meeting and wrote or replied to at least one message were analyzed.

The complete study, "Productivity at Work: The Fuze Communications Index," is available for download here: https://main-de.fuze.com/productivity-at-work