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The era of the global business is here—but it’s not a world that consists of offices and regional headquarters in the same way it once did. Today’s multinationals might be huge Fortune 5000 companies—or they may be small consultants with a minimal personnel footprint. But thanks to VoIP and IP video implementations, companies of all sizes can overcome geographical barriers to enable effective communication and collaboration between employees, partners, suppliers and clients.

Clearly, given the number of mobile employees and those who work from home, organizations of all stripes are increasingly borderless—and IP communications offers a path to implementing a reliable and flexible business phone system. But expanding into different countries adds a new wrinkle to the distributed office scenario: time zones and cultural habits must be taken into account, and local talent needs to be recruited. VoIP and video can cut down on the complexities and expenses involved in those efforts.

For instance, when companies expand to new markets, it’s necessary to hire workers that have knowledge of the local culture—IP’s unique characteristics are a particular boon here.

“It is becoming increasingly rare for a company to be able to recruit top talent within the close vicinity of its headquarters or other offices,” explained VoIP Studio, in a blog. “However, that does not mean that the company has to restrict itself to a smaller pool of candidates. Evaluating employees for new positions who are far away often takes the form of phone interviews – though it enables communication, it generally does not provide enough information to make hiring judgments.”

With VoIP, organizations can conduct video interviews with potential candidates as many times as it is necessary to come to a decision. Neither the enterprise nor the candidate has to waste time and money in traveling to the interview location, giving both parties the opportunity to have more interviews than would otherwise be possible.

Often, to create effective teams, communications need to support calling that behave as though members are in the same physical location—VoIP’s four-digit dialing across locations, chat functionality and find-me, follow-me functions can all go a long way to making international communications productive.

“Imagine that a new member [from] Europe [needs to work with a U.S. team],” VoIP Studio noted. Setting up effective processes with traditional communications can take anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of months, which could cause considerable delay. “Instead, the organization can provision local numbers and enable other UC features such as video chat for the new member so that he/she can get started immediately.”