Yet as helpful as it is to providing fresh, new perspectives on ideas and projects, effective collaboration can be hard to come by. This is where collaborative meeting spaces come into play.
Driven by new technology and trends, collaborative meeting rooms have become increasingly more popular in today’s work environments. In this blog post, we discuss the trends and benefits, the different types, and the technology needed to create effective collaboration rooms.
Trends Driving the Collaborative Meeting Space Movement
Work From Home or Anywhere
Gone are the days of everyone needing to be physically present for a successful meeting. Between 2005 and 2018, remote work in the United States has risen by 173%. Furthermore, with the influence of the pandemic, that number has risen even further with no signs of slowing down.
As more businesses embrace remote work policies, employees are looking for new ways to stay productive while on the go. Luckily, collaborative meeting spaces allow workers to maintain productivity by allowing them to conduct business from anywhere with an internet connection. Effective and productive meetings can now be conducted between people on opposite sides of the planet as if they were sharing the same conference room.
New Communication Preferences
Zoom, Skype, Teams, and similar technologies aren't just creating a new generation of collaborative meeting spaces. They're influencing the way we prefer to communicate with others.
For example, many video conferencing software programs now give users the ability to share and control other screens from any distance. Zoom has grown particularly popular amongst remote workers, giving them the freedom to collaborate with people and entire teams they may otherwise never have known.
The Failure of Open Concept Buildings Workspaces
Many modern offices attempted to join the push towards open concept floor plans for their employees. While good-natured, this setup was found to have inconsistent success rates at the best of times. Employees reported feeling productive, pressured to work longer and harder, and even getting sick more frequently.
Collaboration rooms create environments with the best of both worlds, allowing employees to work together closely when they need to, then break off for individual work when they're ready.
A Workforce Accustomed to Flexibility
Today's employees are more tech-savvy and flexible than ever before. The truth is, many employees are used to working on their own time, from anywhere. The time has never been better for collaborative spaces with integrated technology for hybrid in-office and work-from-home schedules. Regardless of where your different team members work, they can all work together for the benefit of your business.
Types of Collaborative Meeting Spaces
What do these collaborative meeting spaces look and feel like? There are a few different options, depending on the type of collaboration you're looking for.
Informing
Where do you go when you need to teach your team something new? In an informative collaborative space, you'll find large monitors, projection screens, displays, audio equipment, and more.
This type of collaboration works best for meetings where there's little to no discussion required, as only one person or a small team will be educating an audience. However, high quality signal management and crisp visual displays are critical to keeping audiences engaged.
Accomplishing
When your team needs to work on a specific project altogether, they need a better space to do it than your typical, intimidating conference room. Creating spaces with the ability to connect multiple people across different locations, or individuals in the same room with their own devices is now a critical part of creating collaboration rooms designed to help your teams accomplish their goals. To do so effectively, you need equipment that can handle HDMI signals from multiple sourcesto multiple destinations.
Brainstorming
New ideas, rethought concepts, and strategic thinking are the drivers of exponential business growth. To encourage brilliant ideas, your teams need a space large enough for all of them to work at once, but also intimate enough for quiet conversation or one-on-one collaboration.
Connecting
In the age of digital relationships, both personal and professional, creating spaces for your employees to connect and engage with each other is of the utmost importance. Use these spaces for networking events, making sure they're as comfortable and seamless as possible.
Collaborative Meeting Room Technology
While each collaborative space differs depending on your needs, your industry, and your business, there are many shared characteristics from a technological standpoint.
-
Brightness & Clarity: Full HD 1080P / 4K resolution
It has been shown that brighter, higher-resolution displays are able to increase the speed with which we can intake, organize, and act upon information. Accordingly, better displays mean more productive workdays and more efficient employees.
Better display capabilities also make your organization look more professional and more polished. 1080P and 4K resolutions remain the best options as of the writing of this article. Anything less and you could risk appearing unprofessional, or worse, incompetent, depending on your industry.
-
Easy-to-Install, All-In-One Solutions
Collaboration rooms are better when they work simply and easily. The easier the technology is to install and use, the more quickly you can set it up and the more likely your employees are to use the features you're adding.
When looking for technological solutions, choose the ones that allow you to do more with less. Whether that’s extended capabilities or simply advanced tech that does the simplification for you, there are great AV signal management products you can incorporate to make your collaborative room a success, rather than a hassle for your employees to deal with.
-
Greater Reliability
Don't be the company with frustratingly slow or ineffective technology. Nothing loses you credibility and productivity faster than excessive buffering, or a complete loss of signal during an important meeting. Upgrading to newer technology with greater reliability is crucial to creating effective collaboration rooms. Your team, your partners, and your clients will all thank you.
