One-Third of the Indian Workforce Keen on Innovative Videoconferencing Solutions at Work: Barco ClickShare Study

The study – which surveyed 1,750 employees around the world (250 each from the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, India and United Arab Emirates) through global research panel provider Dynata – found that only 15% of employees, globally, want to continue to work from home full-time after COVID-19 restrictions are lifted.

The Barco ClickShare study states that India is one of the countries with the lowest desire to work from home in the future, wanting only 1.8 days a week at home, on average. Employees are keen on a hybrid workplace model, where most of their time is spent in the office but they have the flexibility and freedom to work from home when it works best for them. Further, employees are looking for organizations to invest in a technology-driven hybrid working environment post-COVID-19.

Employees have high expectations for technology-driven improvements in future meetings. Eight in ten Indian respondents predict that voice recognition tools, such as Alexa, Google and Siri, will become widely used in conferencing sessions. As the use of virtual reality (VR) is beginning to gather pace in other areas, most Indian office workers (87%) believe its use to visualize ‘in person’ remote participants will become standard within the next two years, the study stated. Further, nearly three in four (72%) respondents predicted that hand gestures would be used to control meeting room technology within two years.

The ‘Bring Your Own Meeting’ trend that was growing before COVID-19 – where employees wanted to use their own devices (Bring Your Own Device) and preferred conferencing solutions – has continued during the pandemic. Organizations must incorporate agnostic collaboration solutions in the workplace as almost three in 10 Indians admit that their preferred video conferencing platform is often incompatible with the available in-office meeting room technology. 24% of the office workers often struggle to connect to a conferencing meeting room system, causing unwanted delays and frustrations.

The study shows that most employees think the world is already returning to normalcy, post-COVID, with the number of remote-only meetings expected to drop significantly and hybrid meetings set to become the norm. Indian employees are most keen to continue working in large offices (62%) rather than moving to smaller ‘satellite’ offices once the COVID-19 threat has eased, with an overwhelming 88% of respondents wanting a designated desk to call their own. Indians also have the highest preference for formal meeting rooms (58%), the study reported.