Video conferencing technology and real-time electronic document management are the most effective drivers of collaboration within workplaces, according to a Deloitte Access Economics report on Australia’s collaborative economy.

The Collaborative Economy report estimates that collaboration has a net value-add to the Australian economy of $46 billion and suggests that with improved strategies towards better collaboration it could be worth an additional $9 billion a year, with technology the most influential factor in making improvements.

Businesses with a collaborative working strategy are twice as likely to outgrow competitors and more likely to improve profit. Medibank, NAB and BHP Billiton are just a few high-profile examples of businesses that have moved to activity based workplaces to encourage greater collaboration.

The benefits of a collaborative workplace also extend to employees, who on average work 15 per cent faster in a collaborative environment with the majority producing better quality and more innovative work and experiencing a greater overall job satisfaction.

Peter Swanson head of Sales and Marketing at AMX Australia, the unified communications firm involved in several projects including NAB’s award-winning new headquarters in Melbourne, said that effective unified communications systems doesn’t mean businesses need to invest in a brand new ‘bells and whistles’ AV solution to realise benefits.

“In a number of cases businesses already have the technology to encourage collaboration, but what is new is how this technology is being integrated in to business processes and other building operating systems to enhance building intelligence and improve the overall end-user experience,” Mr Swanson said.

“Businesses are going through a radical change whereby high-tech AV systems that were traditionally restricted to the executive suite and a few meeting rooms are now in virtually every single meeting room and they are driving a reliance on video collaboration technology.

The shift in the approach to video collaboration technology within the workplace means that complex and sophisticated systems need to be extremely intuitive and simple to operate for the end-user in order to achieve business process efficiencies.

“Working with the end-users and avoiding a technocrat-led approach, which can often result in spaceship-like operating consoles and many wasted hours in technology support and training, is key to businesses implementing the right technology,” Mr Swanson said.

“We and our integration partners aim to reduce the amount of actions that it takes to get things working. For example, if someone walks in to a meeting room you can make the assumption that the lights and the screen should turn on and you can automate this process.”

Integrated systems also allow businesses to collect meeting data, such as what technology and tools are most frequently used, initial and final actions while in the meeting room and how often meetings run under or over time.

“The collected data enables you to improve the performance and management of the meeting rooms, which in the case of buildings such as NAB’s or BHP’s, can alone save the business many hours of resources every week,” Mr Swanson said.

“Technology has been both the enabler and the barrier to video collaboration in the past. If you create a system that is hard to use, people won’t use it. If you create something that is intuitive and minimises the amount of actions it takes for people to communicate, collaboration can take place from any room in any office throughout the world.”