Office space has come a long way. Industry leaders are doing away with the grey fabric floor tiles and polystyrene ceiling panels in favour of bright, vibrant, spacious offices that inject an element of fun and creativity into the working day. As the office space has evolved, so too has the meeting room.
Imposing dark meeting rooms have been replaced by everything from Scandi-inspired spaces to woven meeting pods, just like this impressive set-up at an office in Mumbai.
Aside from a table laden with croissants and coffee in a breakfast briefing, there are numerous ways to create the perfect environment for your team in a meeting room. But keep in mind that, from an aesthetic perspective, pushing the boundaries and constructing unique surroundings for your meetings is an appealing prospect, the space has to be functional first and foremost.
Designing A Better Working Experience – Removing Work Stress
The perfect meeting room is all about the creation of an environment that’s conducive to a smooth collaborative process – for both internal teams and clients. Failing to create such a space can have a significant knock-on effect on employee morale and productivity.
Take the findings from a 2016 Barco survey for example, which found that nine in ten workers experience heightened stress levels when tackling unreliable tech during meetings. In fact, the study stated that business people’s heart rates jumped from around 60-100bpm to 179bpm when grappling with meeting room technology, and with two thirds of office workers having to take time out of their day regularly to deal with meeting room tech, that’s a lot of unnecessary stress.
So, although the temptation may be to focus on installing themed modular pods to promote creativity and reduce stress, similar to those in Google’s London premises, ensuring that your meeting room is fully equipped from a technical perspective and prepped prior to a big meeting should be your first port of call.
The Evolution of the Workforce
Millennials may never have worked in the ‘pre-tech’ era, but many other people still working today have spent a significant period of their careers working in meeting rooms with no connectivity to the outside world beyond a telephone, and handouts were the order of the day, not shared screens and displays.
How people conduct meetings has changed immeasurably over the past few decades and it’s impacted our approach to business in general. We expect flexibility and dynamism in everything we do, agile is the name of the game. With the help of video conferencing, improved AV equipment, and better connectivity, people can engage with teams across the globe, bringing satellite offices into conference rooms and driving collaboration and creativity forward.
So what does the perfect meeting room in today’s day and age need to maximise the space and reflect your business’ values, whilst simultaneously improving connectivity and productivity?
The right technology.
Where to Start?
Given that the fundamental objective of a meeting is communication – whether that’s in the form of sharing ideas with your team, briefing employees, or presenting to new clients – it’s troubling to see that one of the main obstacles for workers worldwide is in sharing screens and content.
In order to communicate ideas and strategies, it’s vital for all participants to be able to visualise the presenter’s or team’s presentation. Points to consider early on in your meeting room setup include organising your furniture around the most likely focal point – a digital screen. Often, the main problem is that screens can’t be seen by some of the audience as clearly as they should.
Large format displays have reduced in price a lot over the last few years so going bigger doesn’t have to be budget-busting. Sixty-five-inch displays are quite a tipping point in price due to market volumes and for many smaller meeting rooms, this size is adequate. Read more about gauging the right screen size for your meeting room here.
If you’ve got a larger room though, you’ll have to consider multiple screens or a single, large display like the Sony FW-100BZ40J, a display that delivers maximum impact in corporate settings with a 100-inch screen and UHD resolution for detailed presentations.
Get Involved – Improving Participation
But technology is no use without the tools that enable people to use it, so stage 2 in the perfect meeting room setup should be to ensure that all your desired AV equipment has the correct ports that it needs. TechConnect offers a range of module and cable packages that can be easily installed, and with an improved finish, there’s no need to compromise on the style of your meeting space.
Multiple spokespersons with the shared objective of collaboration shouldn’t create unnecessary setbacks in your meeting room or require a rotating seating plan to participate in a presentation.
Devices like the Barco ClickShare help to create a productive environment in which multiple people can contribute and present on a shared main display screen.
By allowing your colleagues or clients to share their input effortlessly with the help of multi-user connectivity tools, you immediately reduce the stress of passing around wires and connections, avoiding any interruptions to the flow of the meeting and minimising the need for a tangle of unsightly cables.
Striking a Balance – Form and Function
By prioritising technology and functionality in your meeting room, you can create the perfect balance between style and purpose. A well-stocked space, with all the necessary ports; neat cables; a clear large format display screen as the focus of the room and wireless technology to get everyone involved, constructs a productive and stress-free meeting space that your teams will want to work in.