The meeting rooms of the future

UC&C | UC&C

31/10/2024

Creating Collaborative, Future-Ready Meeting Spaces

Today’s technology is already enabling collaborative, immersive and highly productive meetings, offering a high-quality, frictionless experience both for physically onsite users and remotely connected ones.

According to a recent survey by Eagle Hill Consulting, half of workers prefer flexible working models. Hybrid work stopped being an exception long ago to become not only a kind of standard (62% of US companies adopted it somehow, as reported by Flex Index), but, primarily, a demand for talent.

To attract and retain the best resources on the market, companies need to rethink their working spaces: modern, innovative environments that offer a productivity and collaboration level to engage even remote workers to come to the office and achieve an experience unattainable in their homes or anywhere else, thanks to their 3-pillar support: video, audio and architecture.

In fact, these common spaces offer screens to view content, interactive whiteboards for real-time collaboration in the most natural way possible, microphones and speakers to enable maximum audio quality and the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to collaborate with simultaneous interpretations to any language, debate transcripts, or debriefings for those who did not make it.

The days when a single multipurpose room was equipped, used either for an in-person meeting as well as for a videoconference or team training, are long gone.

However, it is essential to highlight the importance of having users adequately trained for the appropriate adoption of these technologies and to contribute to work teams’ productivity. And this is precisely one of the service distinctive features delivered by some companies -such as Cirion Technologies- in their implementation process.

Versatility: the key word

Organizations need multiple collaboration spaces nowadays; each of them adjusted to different needs — some small for highly interactive meetings with a few people, others slightly larger when a speaker is addressing to a restricted audience, some huge for events that bring more people together…

“Versatility” is the key word in any case. These environments must be easily managed and configured, and should offer, as one of their main requirements, the same quality of experience and frictionless connectivity both for the people physically there as well as for “visitors” accessing from anywhere through their devices.

When the design is appropriate, all people are at the same focal point with respect to the screen, the audio can be heard perfectly from all positions and even the tables and headboards are designed so that two users do not interfere with each other at all.

As technology advances at full speed and offers new device alternatives at every moment, as well as collaboration and technological tools, having a strategic partner in charge of planning, designing, and implementing these meeting rooms as a managed service, is of the essence. Thus, companies are able to continue focusing on their core business, freeing themselves from maintenance, connections quality or updates, with the peace of mind that everything will be always running.

Trends indicate that even more intelligent and immersive technologies will be adopted in the next future, such as virtual, mixed and augmented realities, taking the experience to the next levels. Even so, we can affirm that technologies available today allow us to enjoy the concept of “meeting rooms of the future”, as we speak.