While AI has dominated much of the discourse around the UC and collaboration sector in 2023, it isn't the only area seeing exciting innovations.
As illustrated by a fascinating Infocomm 2023, meeting room technology — and more broadly, the meeting room experience — is enjoying a golden age of progress and invention as vendors look to capitalise on the normalisation of hybrid working.
The best and brightest have observed that hybrid working not only isn't a temporary fad but that solutions catering to the needs of a truly hybrid workforce require genuine flexibility — and the constantly-growing market will respond with enthusiasm to these kinds of reliable and flexible products.
At the heart of this trend are solutions that meaningfully engage every meeting participant, whether in the on-premises meeting room, in their home office, or anywhere else with a dependable internet connection. Three years since the pandemic-facilitated UC boom, the level of innovation the industry is experiencing is monumental.
"It's a really fascinating evolution," Evan Kirstel, Social Media Strategist at BCStrategies, told UC Today. "We've gone from work from home to all hybrid, all the time. I think the whole industry has shifted to focusing on the importance of hybrid meetings as businesses look to accommodate in-person and remote participants without them being left out of the discussion as they traditionally have been. AV solutions now need to seamlessly support those kinds of hybrid meetings."
"Flexibility has become the new mantra, I think," Kirstel continued. "It's not work-from-home or in-office. It's 'work from anywhere', and meetings need to be easily configurable to any type of experience. The focus now is on that employee experience, that user experience, that UX or UI. We don't have tolerance for difficult or hard-to-use meeting technology anymore. Standards have been raised through the pandemic."
Kirstel stressed that ease of use is "really important". "The whole idea of design thinking when it comes to meeting spaces has come to the fore. It's really about creating a meeting space conducive to collaboration and productivity," he added.
The challenge with returning to the office, even in a hybrid capacity, is that many workers have experienced the home comforts of productivity-enabling set-ups they created remotely over the past few years. It might prove not easy to return to an unchanged work environment after some workers have learned they can work more productively, collaboratively and happily remotely.
"We got used to being in our living rooms and cocoons and having our space and lighting and sound the way we wanted it, and many of us got pretty good at working from home," Kirstel said.
"But now, when we go into the office, we don't want a sea of cubicles anymore," he continued. "We want good lighting, we want a comfortable environment, we want temperature control, we want comfortable seating, we want cameras that make us look better. We want a distraction-free environment.
