After looking at the impact that poor videoconferencing set-ups were having on company operations, the company found a way to save money and refine workflow with a new platform in its conference rooms – then had to roll it out while everyone was at home.
Story by Lisa Schmeiser, No Jitter
The ritual of logging on to a meeting with remote participants – whether over the phone or over a video conferencing platform – can be fraught with technical difficulties that frustrate the participants and eat up the time allotted for collaboration. Joshua Baever, Senior Systems Reliability Engineer at T-Mobile, was charged with finding a way to make videoconferencing work for T-Mobile’s employees across multiple campuses.
During Cisco Live in June 2023, Baever sat down with No Jitter to explain why reducing hybrid meeting participants’ log-in times matters to a company’s bottom line, how to identify the pain points in meeting experiences, and what it was like working with Cisco to outfit 2,000-plus conference rooms with Webex during the beginning of the pandemic.
Q. Why is losing time in meetings such a problem? Why do you care if it takes people 15 minutes to log into a meeting?
Joshua Baever: It comes down to two or three factors. The first one is just user base burnout and frustration. I mean, think about the dread of every time you have to start a meeting – you know you’re going to have to wrestle with the technology and it’s going to make you look stupid, especially if you have clients coming in or clients trying to dial in and get them into the meeting. That not only makes you look incompetent, but it makes the business look incompetent like you can’t put together a working solution.
