Enhancing scalability and innovation with modern workplace collaboration

By Jason MacBride (pictured), Regional Director ANZ, Neat

As financial services firms across Australia continue to innovate and scale rapidly, team collaboration and human-centric workspaces have become paramount to maintaining business momentum and growth. While delivering a positive technology experience for customers is one of the main goals of financial services companies like banks or insurance providers, it is also just as crucial to remember the benefits of being able to provide positive collaboration and multi-purpose spaces to enhance employee well-being and productivity. In fact, recent Gartner research underlines how the relationship between people and their working environment has become a crucial factor in how employees can perform, relate and connect with others.

In response to this, choosing the right video collaboration technology is no longer a siloed IT decision – increasingly, we are seeing HR, Chief People Officers and even CEOs engaging in these conversations. These decisions on the hybrid and in-office experience can help to drive greater business outcomes, such as reducing employee churn, boosting productivity, scaling in a more efficient manner, and enhancing customer satisfaction.

Leveraging Collaboration Technology within Financial Services to Enhance Competitive Advantages 

The evolution of modern workplaces is being driven by several factors, but three of the biggest are the need to improve communication and align technology investments with business objectives, the need to improve productivity and accommodate employee needs, and the growing importance of working towards environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals.

As Frost & Sullivan said, “Even though hybrid work levels are three to four times what they were pre-pandemic, two out of three organisations have put guidelines, if not mandates, in place for the number of in-office days. There is a growing emphasis on redesigning the workplace, investing in technologies, and other elements to create a better office and meeting room experience.” On top of this, Tech.co also reported that 55% of companies using collaborative tools and AI experience higher productivity. Leading vendors are enhancing collaboration features with the likes of artificial intelligence to better capture meeting data, facilitate collaboration, and create equitable and engaging meeting environments.

As reported by the analysts and employers themselves, if chosen wisely, modern video collaboration technology not only enables greater productivity but can improve how businesses operate and manage resources.

Prioritising People: The Key to Modern Hybrid Workplace Success 

The most successful hybrid workplace models are based on a human-centric work design or putting people first, with intentional collaboration, flexibility and empathy-based management at the forefront.

Intentional collaboration refers to the ability to emphasise everyone’s performance while also accommodating individual preferences and accessibility needs. More broadly, collaboration can be enhanced with a combination of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, with the ability to adapt to the team and task at hand.

Flexibility is where business leaders offer employees autonomy over where and how they work, while also providing the means and solutions for collaboration no matter where people are. Empathy describes different aspects of a workplace environment, and when it comes to leadership, it refers to a top-down approach where leaders are empathetic to employees’ needs and provide guidance without micro-management.

These fundamentals can lead to a greater sense of support, increased employee performance, and improved attraction and retention of talent, with cumulative benefits over time.

To consider this in a real-world context, let’s take a closer look at how Neat helped Atlassian Corporation unleash the potential of its teams.

Atlassian Unleashes the Potential of its Teams by Making Video Collaboration More Equitable and Productive 

Unleashing the potential of teams is the core mission of Atlassian Corporation, delivering products for software developers, project managers and other teams. Over 250,000 customers globally (including Neat!) rely on Atlassian’s team collaboration software like Jira, Confluence and Trello to help their teams organise, discuss, and complete shared work. That’s why it’s critical that Atlassian’s internal teams are also able to collaborate easily to drive innovation and support their customers.

Atlassian has over 10,000 employees across 13 countries, so remote video collaboration has always been important. But, over the last several years, Atlassian has fully embraced hybrid and remote working – in the last two years around 40% of employees are more than two hours from an office – so it’s more critical than ever that remote and hybrid workers have the tools they always needed to fully engage and collaborate freely.

They decided to shift to using Zoom and Neat, making simple and powerful video collaboration available to remote and office employees in as many spaces as possible. “Since 2020, Atlassian has adopted “Team Anywhere”, giving our employees the freedom to choose where they work. That means we need to be more intentional about how and where we collaborate, so we’ve deployed Neat devices throughout our offices. Using Zoom plus Neat devices, we can make sure that remote employees can collaborate easily and have as good of an experience as the people in the room,” said Harvey Jones, Workplace Collaboration Lead for Atlassian.

As hybrid work has become the norm, it is important that Atlassian’s offices are designed to optimise the video collaboration experience for people that choose to be in the office as well as team members who are remote. They are redesigning many of their offices to provide more flexible meeting spaces that can support large team gatherings and smaller focus sessions.

As part of their hybrid work culture, many teams now hold “intentional togetherness gatherings” or ITGs, coming together in the office to brainstorm, hold training sessions or for team building. Leveraging Neat Board on its moveable stand or Neat Bar Pro, the teams can create the space they need quickly and easily, with the technology they need to be most effective.

A key part of Atlassian’s video collaboration culture is whiteboarding. Their offices housed physical whiteboards in most spaces, but the rise in remote working presented challenges. Atlassian has adopted virtual collaboration tools, including the capabilities in their own Confluence solution as well as Zoom’s whiteboarding capabilities and third-party applications such as Miro and Mural to enable teams to whiteboard and collaborate.

The ‘Secret Sauce’ to Designing a Productive Hybrid Workplace – Keeping it Simple 

Underlying Atlassian’s approach to video collaboration technology are tools that are simple to use, simple to deploy and simple to manage.

Atlassian’s Harvey Jones, commented, “Using Neat has been an easy choice for us. Having a powerful solution like Neat Board that can be easily set up then moved around as needed to stand up a new space quite quickly gives us the flexibility we need to support our hybrid teams.”

While collaboration technology can never replace meeting someone in real life, innovative video technology combined with thoughtful workplace design continues to shrink the digital divide between physical and virtual, helping people and organisations engage more naturally and ultimately get work done.