As everyone knows, the pandemic of the last many years created a new work-from-home revolution as companies faced office shutdowns and work went remote. Practically overnight, most employees became proficient with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, WebEx, and cloud-based collaboration platforms for a new way of communicating, meeting, and collaborating. 

But was it really a revolution? Or did the pandemic shoot a giant dose of adrenaline into the arm of a long-term trend? The truth is, remote work and workers were already a thing before anyone could spell COVID. Companies large and small had already discovered the benefits of a virtually connected organization. Using the aforementioned tools from Microsoft, Zoom, Cisco and many other companies, organizations discovered the benefits of not having a physical location – in terms of costs, employee satisfaction, hiring flexibility, and other areas. If your organization is completely virtual, perhaps you can stop reading here – you might not care about meeting rooms or hybrid work. 

However, we know that most organizations still need and rely on physical worker interaction and collaboration. It may be due to the business model, product or services, supply chain, or other business factors. And many companies are struggling to define just how hybrid work will work for their organization, which leads us to the meeting room. After all, if all your staff had to do is sit in front of a computer doing their work all day long in a cubicle or open office space, you don't need them back in the office. But if they benefit from and need in-person collaboration, your current meeting room design may not work for a model where some are in the office and others are remote. 

Let’s explore the issues with current meeting room design and how you can reimagine your spaces for a hybrid work model below.

The modern workplace is undergoing a profound paradigm shift in 2021. Full-time in-office work is no longer the norm; instead, the new hybrid workplace includes an eclectic mix of full-time remote employees, full-time in-office employees, and part-time remote and in-office workers. 

In the wake of these shifts, organizations must rethink one of the most foundational components of the modern office: meeting rooms. How does meeting room design need to pivot to meet the needs of globally dispersed workforces? Below, we outline four considerations your organization should keep top of mind to design effective and productive meeting spaces for your office locations in Scottsdale, AZ, and throughout the world. 

Meetings are a fact of life for the modern employee in today’s workforce. But having a meeting and having a productive meeting are two completely different concepts. A few years back, Harvard Business Review conducted a survey with 182 senior managers. Approximately 71% said that meetings are unproductive and inefficient, and 62% said that meetings miss opportunities to bring the team closer together. 

Meeting room design plays a significant role in facilitating productive meetings. Easy-to-use AV technologies foster better communications and more interactive collaboration while eliminating common meeting hiccups like bad audio and IT problems. And good AV design is more critical today than ever as meeting spaces shift to accommodate more video conferencing and remote collaboration.

The video conferencing market is estimated to reach more than $20 billion by 2024. In a marketplace that size, there is no shortage of solutions vying for your attention. Here are four types of video collaboration tools that deserve it. Check our list of what’s trending in conferencing and collaboration and why. Then talk to us about your video collaboration needs.

Collaborative workplaces are the new normal across industries, and technology that supports collaboration isn’t a nice-to-have anymore—it’s a must-have. As outlined in this case study about financial services firm Bradley Wealth, clients also expect updated technology that makes working with your company easy and engaging. But just because employees and clients want and expect to work collaboratively doesn’t mean that it’s always simple or smooth.

Have you ever had those meetings when you would bring your laptop or tablet but couldn’t connect it to a projector, monitor, or any other kind of peripheral? With a presentation ready to go, you wasted so much time trying to figure out how to make the technology work. It can either transform a meeting into a complete frustration or really make it valuable. Some of the most common meeting problems companies have are trouble with starting and finishing a meeting on time. Factors like failing technology, silent participants and collaboration dominators often result in a conducted meeting with no decisions made. The results of this survey show that 45% of participants most of the time leave a meeting without a clear understanding of their responsibilities. Also, 47% of workers react stressfully to tech malfunction. With Layer Logic’s CoreTouch, Today, we have a device that’s both easy to use and simplifies collaboration and sharing.

There are plenty of times when less is more, including when you are making decisions about your conference room technology. The best meeting room technology is a simple, one-stop, unified solution. But many conference rooms today are cluttered with technologies, including conference phones, USB speaker phones, flat panel displays, laptops or desktops running meeting applications, and lots and lots of cables. Some technologies might be compatible while others aren’t, and integrating personal devices such as mobile phones is complicated at best and impossible at worst. Meetings can already be a drag—a poorly equipped meeting space only makes it worse. The Crestron Mercury was developed to address those common—and annoying—problems with the typical meeting room user experience. And Crestron’s new partnership with online meeting platform Zoom takes meeting efficiency to the next level.