Introduction
UK offices have a huge culture of meetings, in our latest survey it was found that 90% of UK office workers are having up to ten meetings per week, yet almost half report that their meeting rooms aren’t facilitating productivity and collaboration. Meeting rooms have come a long way in recent years, especially with the development of collaboration technologies, but what are the meeting room essentials and what are the nice to haves?
Meeting Room Essentials
Recent times and developments have shown that audio, and particularly video conferencing are essential to a productive and efficient business. Video conferencing used to be a luxury in meeting rooms but with the rise of flexible working and clients and staff being based around the world, a good video / audio conferencing system is now an essential for every business.
With customers across the county, or even the world, a virtual meeting can allow for agreed start time and end-time, benefiting all those involved. Allowing for a more intensive discussion with less chit-chat. Instead of trailing through long email chains, where messages can be obscured, participants can see visual cues in body language from customers, partners and colleagues – video conferencing is the closest thing to being there in person.
It’s all well and good having a high-end video conferencing system set up but if the audio isn’t as high quality, then the conference isn’t as productive. You can easily have an audio conference without video but the same cannot be said for a video conference without audio, yet companies are treating audio in their meeting rooms as a second thought. Audio is much of an essential as video when it comes to conferencing in our eyes.
The benefits of video conferencing completely outweigh the costs and set up. Not only can you have spontaneous meetings with team members and clients across the globe, you can also annotate documents in real-time, share screens and stay in touch with real-time live chats. There is no argument to say that video conferencing is not an essential in today’s world.
This next one is a little debatable on whether or not it is an essential or luxury, but from our experience and point of view we believe it is an essential. Room booking systems are becoming fundamental for businesses, they have the capabilities to receive room insights, helping you to improve the way you work and optimise recourses.
According to statistics, meeting rooms only get utilised around a third of the time they are booked. A room booking system can provide the insight of rooms and the patterns of bookings and cancellations, helping you to manage and better understand meeting space for greater efficiencies.
Meeting Room Luxuries
We all know the challenges of arranging meetings when people are in multiple locations, operating individual work diaries and so on. For that reason, there has been significant growth in wireless presentation technology. With wireless presentation and collaboration systems, multiple people can engage in a meeting, conference or training session. It makes sharing and presenting in meetings seamless, irrespective of location. Using a laptop or mobile device, staff and customers can view, edit and comment on documents in real time, share files and chat with individuals or multiple participants simultaneously.
A great technology for collaboration and a luxury is a touch screen, and we’re not talking about your average white board touch screen, we mean touch screens that can respond to unlimited touches by fingers, infrared pens and 2D barcodes with real time response. You could bring your touch screens to life with a solution that allows agile teams to connect in real-time, share ideas and solve business problems using live data – real luxury, right?
Meeting Room essentials that are also a luxury
Our final technology on the list is also up for some deliberation as to whether it is an essential or not, so we’ve classed it as both. Sound masking was once a luxury but with today’s modern meeting rooms, we have found it is certainly an essential.
Sixty-four percent of UK office workers have overheard a confidential or sensitive conversation in the workplace that they shouldn’t have, because of this almost half of office workers are reluctant to discuss a private or sensitive issue in the workplace, even in a private meeting room. In today’s modern office the lack of privacy is a real problem, particularly in between meeting rooms. The utilisation of glass partitions and large folding doors in between meeting rooms means that noise seeps through to the adjacent room and surrounding areas.
Sound Masking can provide 100% noise privacy between and around meeting rooms, meaning conferences and private discussion can once again, be confidential.
