How can you make the most of every opportunity to delight your existing client base?
How do you identify new areas to expand your business?
How can you improve employee engagement?

These are just a few of the challenges that organizations face today.

Deloitte's Human Capital Trends 2014 survey explores "two major themes underlying this year's trends: globalization and the speed and extent of technological change and innovation." The survey authors also describe the challenge of employee retention and engagement as - after leadership - the second-most urgent issue for the organizations surveyed.  The challenge is not simply identifying and keeping staff, but creating a "passionate and compassionate" place for them to work.

In its own survey, Virgin Media found that 78% of U.K. employees believe that companies need to offer "anytime, anywhere" work flexibility to attract and retain staff.

Therefore, with increasing globalization and the need to support flexible working environments to retain and nurture talent, we rely more on collaboration technology to build strong relationships with colleagues, customers, and partners.

Create the Environment for Good Connections

How can you ensure that employees stay connected with colleagues and with customers and partners?It's essential to provide easy-to-use collaboration tools with all the capabilities that people need. Making high-quality video communications available anytime, and on any device, can help people build strong relationships.

This is a topic close to my heart. I'm based in the U.K. and spend nearly 50% of my working time talking with colleagues based in continental Europe and the full range of U.S. time zones from the east to the west coast. For me, this would not work without applications that let us easily meet and communicate effectively at any time.

All organizations face the challenge of enabling everyone to collaborate effectively from any location. And not just effectively, but simply with business-quality tools that integrate video.

Find the Right Technology

The Cisco Collaboration Technology Group has been busy innovating to develop new products and evolve. We have made many significant advances in just the past year. We released several new endpoints - from desktop to immersive video - and we delivered many infrastructure innovations to make the video experience far more intuitive, accessible, and simple to implement. These include:

• A new in-meeting experience, with ingenious controls that let you see everyone as they join your call, and show each participant's name with his or her video image so you no longer need to double check who is in your call
• Higher capacity video-conferencing platforms that make it more cost effective and simple to enable video for everyone within an organization
• Simplified inclusion of video conferencing as a standard element of unified-communications deployments by integrating video with Business Edition packaged solutions
• Cisco Collaboration Meeting Rooms, which make industry-leading video infrastructure solutions available to anyone and let people meet how they want, using any standards-based video endpoint or browser-enabled device

What's New? What's Next?

Check out posts from Rowan Trollope and Snorre Kjesbu for our latest announcements. Or, watch the Cisco Collaboration Summit keynote to hear from John Chambers, Box CEO Aaron Levie, and Rowan Trollope.

We look forward to bringing the latest collaboration innovations to help you to build your business - and business relationships.