It’s early and you wake up to a bunch of emails. Some have threads of responses and you feel fatigued trying to gauge the intent, emotions and priority of what to respond to. You feel exhausted and your productivity wanes even before the day has begun…

E-mail has been the cornerstone of digital collaboration for over 40 years. However, e-mail clients have never been in tune to how humans actually work and emote. I specifically call out emote, because it’s a critical factor to consider in the humanizing of team collaboration.

Why are e-mails not ideal for collaborative work?

• Emotions: People go through a range of emotions while writing emails – There’s excitement, apprehension, joy, angst and more… but emails have not been designed to capture and express these emotions. It results in dry and robotic conversations. The human mind, however, is quick to attach emotions to what we read. We do this all the time, with books, papers and particularly e-mail.

How often have you ended up misconstruing the intent behind an e-mail?

• Efficiency: E-mail threads often go deep into a topic and lose the effectiveness of why the thread was even started. How often have you noticed e-mails with too much content and the recipients end up not responding/ignoring the ask? Pretty often, I’d conject. Let’s not even get into the find-ability and just pure “backlog” management that ends up making you less effective at your job.

Emotions in collaboration are hugely unheralded; as is efficiency in terms of response times. With growing global teams & organizations, businesses need to adopt products that support these aspects. Access to content and tools, when you need it and where you need it, is critical. It enables users to connect with each other seamlessly and build strong working relationships.

The Human Element of Cisco Webex

I’ll start with a personal anecdote here. I joined the Webex organization four months ago. Prior to this I interviewed with six leaders on the team. Most of these happened remotely, video conferencing over Webex Meetings. I met my manager, SVP/GM of the Webex organization, Sri Srinivasan, in person 45 days after I started. We hit the ground running with our planned conversation. It was thirty minutes into this meeting that we realized we were meeting for the first time, in person! The quality of audio and video during our prior meetings made it feel like we were sitting right by each other and not in different cities in the US. In addition, with the rich set of features in the Webex Teams Collaboration app, it felt like we’d already built a professional and personal connection.

With our integrated set of products for Meetings, Team Collaboration and Devices, Cisco Webex has many of the answers to help the above narrative come to life in your work or personal environment. From the video-first experience across the portfolio, to the Webex Teams messaging features, allowing quotes (soon to be released, threading), emoji responses and Giphy, we have your emotional needs covered.

High quality video and audio. Continuous team collaboration before, during and after meetings.

For productivity, our collaboration platform allows users to engage within the context of a topic and bring their tools of choice into a conversation – be it Microsoft’s office suite, access to files on Box, or even a shared Whiteboard that stays digitally live during the life of that conversation. No more arduous context switching. With our recent announcements in the area of cognitive collaboration, we provide a wealth of features that empower you to be better informed and connected with your participants and technology.

Within the Webex ecosystem, the seamless nature of how you transition from an asynchronous conversation, to a live video device meeting with remote participants on any modality (Phones, iPads, Laptops) is truly magical. You can edit a document collaboratively and finally, go back to being asynchronous; making the whole experience feel natural and real.

Message, whiteboard, work on files and meet, all in one canvas.

It would be remiss of me to mention that we’ve got it all right. That’s what makes designing and building products for our users, so exciting! We have more great experiences coming down the pipeline and can’t wait for our users to get their hands on it.

Cisco Webex makes collaboration natural and human for you. I’d highly recommend you empower your teams to work better, together with Webex – take a free trial and experience the goodness, first hand! Hey Webex, over to you…