Meetings are an essential part of an organization's daily activities. It is almost impossible for organizations to engage their employees without having meetings. While several factors affect meeting productivity (like room types, too much technology, and the burden on IT), the condition of the meeting room is an important factor that affects the overall meeting productivity.
Technology is an essential component in meeting rooms, as it is needed to increase productivity, boost collaboration, and decision making. However, the downside to this is that there will be diverse equipment that have different abilities, or several user interfaces.
According to a survey, 68% of employees feel like they’re most likely to experience technical issues at meetings. The way to guaranteeing more engaging and successful meetings regardless of the meeting space is proper standardization.
What is standardization?
Standardization means the regularity of user experience in several spaces. All technologies involved don’t necessarily have to be identical. It is possible that an organization provides the exact same user experience in different rooms irrespective of the size and different technologies.
When you have a standardized meeting room, you do not need to go through new systems for every meeting. Standardization aims at improving the user experience during meetings.
Benefits of standardization
Increase in productivity
Once employees have learned the meeting technology, it saves time. All the time that could have been used for connecting different meeting room technology will be converted into meaningful meeting time.
Employees can walk into any meeting space and start working immediately. This increases the pace and energy that the meeting takes, which in turn increases productivity.
There’s hardly any time wasted on connecting devices. In the case that there are minor tech issues during the meeting, standardizing meeting room tech also helps, because employees already know the necessary things to do to fix the issue instead of calling the IT department's attention. This eventually leads to a much better overall productivity.
More Efficient Troubleshooting
Troubleshooting requires a lot of attention and could be very tedious. Standardization of meeting technology decreases demand on IT resources in regards to this.
The IT staff masters one system, making it easier to help when needed, and proactively addresses issues or fix common glitches.
Having tech issues during a meeting could be disadvantageous. However, a standardized meeting space will help improve the troubleshooting process, and it also cuts the responsibilities of the IT staff.
Troubleshooting becomes less tedious when IT staff become more accustomed with a consistent system and when the employees know how to go about it.
More Efficient Training
Standardization not only saves time that would have been used for meeting room technology training, but it also makes it more efficient. Gradually, even the toughest of technologies can be learned if used over time.
Standardization enables organizations to reduce time spent on training by just using one platform. Once taught, end-users already know how to use the system in any meeting room without additional training.
Standardization also allows making accurate plans for meeting rooms and other future needs of the organization.
How to Standardize
Understand Tech Adoption
It is important to understand the technology that employees use. Standardization doesn’t always mean that meeting rooms will need new technology. Occasionally, all you need to do is to complement the current equipment instead of bringing in a complete replacement.
This could simply mean adding a few additional pieces of technology to the present system to support the end-user experience. Observe your meeting rooms, figure out what works, what's lacking, and what's in excess.
Bringing in end-users at this point is important. They give their feedback on the current space and how it is being used, which helps you decide on the best tech to choose from.
Understand the room types and the kind of functionality needed for each space. Don’t invest in unwanted equipment. The budget that would have been spent on equipment that is not needed can be used to finance useful tech solutions in the organization.
Centralize Purchases
Individuals or departments should not be allowed to buy technology for meeting rooms themselves. Permitting this not only causes inconsistency but could lead to a waste of investment in unwanted equipment.
It has to be a decision made after proper evaluation. Furthermore, technologies that promote consistency across all devices should be highly considered.
Consider future needs
Organizations will most likely change over time. Technology needs to be able to easily keep up with these transformations as soon as they come.
Equipment that is going to be acquired needs to attain a certain level of adaptability and it should achieve cost efficiency. Software-focused solutions give flexibility and upgrade options compared to technology based solely on hardware.
In considering future needs, a meeting space policy should be created for the entire company. The policy should include specifications, the security objectives, and proper guidelines for using the equipment.
It is important to provide a support guide that will list possible issues and solutions. Taking out time to do this helps each person who comes into the meeting rooms understand how to use the systems and the appropriate steps to take in adapting it for future use.
Conclusion
Meeting rooms could be of any size – either large conference rooms or small huddle rooms – as long as they address the meeting needs. Irrespective of meeting room size, technology has to be involved to foster team collaboration and meeting engagement.
The ease of interaction between the teams and the available technology will have an impact on engagement and productivity. The technology in a meeting room can go two ways in affecting it.
Either it promotes quick decision making and innovation, or it hinders it. i3-Technologies’ wireless presenting app and interactive touchscreens take meeting collaboration and productivity to a new level, supporting the freedom for users to share any content throughout a meeting.
To learn more about our portfolio and see how we can help you standardize your meeting space technology, please visit our website.
Written by: Muriel De Bruyne on Monday, June 21, 2021