Video a Decidedly Successful Experiment for the Dow Chemical Company
Polycom video saves Dow money, helps make the company a great place to work.
How does a multinational corporation that employs tens of thousands of people and operates in more than 180 countries stay in touch with customer needs and keep employees connected? If that company is Dow, it uses state-of-the-art video conferencing solutions from Polycom.
Dow is a leading science and technology company that provides innovative chemical, plastic and agricultural products and services. With 46,000 employees and annual sales of $33 billion, Dow serves customers in more than 180 countries. And, according to Chris Duncan, Dow's Global Leader for E-Communication Technology, due to its size and scope, the company was faced with a serious communications challenge.
“Dow started implementing video conferencing in the early nineties to improve communications among its executives spread across the different regions of the world,” explains Duncan. “As the company continued to expand its global operations, video became even more critical for enabling dispersed groups to work together.”
When the company transitioned from a regional organization a few years later to a global business model, video began to play an even bigger role. In this new organizational structure, any given employee could be managed by a supervisor who lived in another state or even another country.
Video at Work
“Video is good for companies and employees,” says Duncan. “Helping people avoid travel increases their quality of life and makes them happier to work at Dow.”
Video is used at the company every day for everything from connecting business units whose members are spread out all over the world, to general update meetings. It's also vital for ensuring consistent practices across business areas.
“We connect the Dow purchasing staff at 32 sites quarterly so they can be sure they are all using the same work processes and approaches for things like vendor selection and sourcing,” adds Duncan. “In a company this size, it's vital to have consistent processes in place.”
Dow also recently brought together its global legal team, located at 43 different sites, over video. This kind of face-to-face interaction would have been impossible without video.