Businesses of all shapes and sizes are now evaluating how to strike the right balance between giving their staff the freedom and flexibility they’ve come to expect as a result of the Covid pandemic whilst ensuring that teams can come together to collaborate and benefit from an office. To achieve this the office must deliver a working environment that provides productive spaces in a way that remote working cannot offer.
One of the key parts of a business’s decision for the future of work is what to do with the office meeting spaces? From the huddle space to the board room, there is now the immediate need to equip spaces to allow for both in-room meeting and collaboration and, more importantly, for remote participants to feel seen, heard and contribute creatively, all supported by a platform that can flow seamlessly from the desktop to the biggest meeting space. The simplistic answer to the above need would be to select audio and video equipment allied to systems and processes plus incorporate the fundamentals of good room design to deliver simple-to-use, easy to operate rooms.
This should be straightforward but all too often, enterprises fall into the trap of starting with their choice of hardware and then attempting to make the technology fit the meeting space, the type of work done, or most often, both. This approach will almost always result in a poor experience because all spaces have different features, characteristics and uses. To ensure optimal performance there is no single solution that should be fitted across every meeting room in an enterprise.
Enterprises should instead be focusing on who uses the space and what each workspace is used for. Perhaps the biggest mindset shift is the need for a fundamental re-imaging of what a meeting space is really catering for. With almost every meeting having at least one remote attendee, the video meeting is now the primary element that the rest of the room should be designed around. The fundamentals of traditional AV design still exist but the need for remote attendees to see and hear what’s going on in the room perfectly is more important than ever. The 190 degree pivot is that features such as lighting and acoustics need designing from the perspective of the remote users.
“The mantra should be: people, place, process and then the technology will define itself,” confirms Andy Byett, a collaboration architect at Resonate. “We find clients are often lured in by the latest tech, but they need to take a step back and think about how to design rooms to get the best productivity and to ensure the experience for the far-end is as good as possible.
