How Q-SYS Provides Touchless Alternatives in Meeting Rooms.

To keep people safe at work, the office must change. Think of all the shared amenities in a corporate office — every area from the breakroom to meeting spaces has a shared surface that people touch throughout the day.

Since COVID-19 can transfer from person to person by way of a contaminated surface, facility managers have their work cut out for them as they rearrange furniture and remove coffee from the breakroom, along with the other actions needed to prepare the office.

But what about meeting rooms?

It’s important to include meeting spaces in your preparations to welcome people back to the office. Not only are these shared, enclosed spaces, they feature a variety of surfaces that if not sanitized regularly could become contaminated.

As you develop reopening plans, consider how office employees use meeting rooms and determine what the safest, most effective solution is for this next era of work.

Consider Touchless Meeting Room Solutions

The challenge every employer faces during this stage of the pandemic is how to bring employees back to work safely. IT and facility leadership must make a number of updates to the office in order to help promote safety and keep employees comfortable. Part of your return-to-work plan should include regular sanitation, but is that enough?

No, you need to combine solutions to launch a comprehensive office refresh on all fronts – from hand sanitizer stations to your audiovisual technology.

For those employees who return to the office first, they must have a safe and adequate work space to meet and collaborate in, without breaching social distancing guidelines or interacting with potentially contaminated surfaces.

Along with others in the market, QSC developed a solution — prior to COVID-19, in fact — that helps address today’s needs for a more efficient, touch-free meeting experience.

Leveraging its Q-SYS Ecosystem, IT managers can deploy a solution that helps employees maximize the use of meeting room technology — but without touching the control panel, the microphone, touch screen display, computer mouse and keyboard.

The company manufactured an IT-friendly, software-based system to control audiovisual technology, including audio, video and control equipment. The major advantages of QSC’s solution is that it centralizes control of this equipment, making service, troubleshooting and setup far easier than having a more dispersed ecosystem.

As it pertains to COVID-19, QSC recently launched touchless meeting room solutions that rely on its Q-SYS solution.

Meeting Participants Can Control the Room from Their Smartphones

The touchless meeting solution by QSC enables meeting room participants to control the room using their personal device, like a smartphone or a tablet.

How It Works (It’s Actually Pretty Simple)

From the Q-SYS Core Manager, a browser-based Core management platform, IT personnel would copy the link to the user control interface (UCI) of the meeting room and use it to generate the QR code. QSC has a plug-in for its Core Manager to generate QR codes, but IT can also use any free tool on the internet to generate one.

Once you have the QR code, display it prominently in the room. It could show up on the control panel in the meeting room, on the display — or even on a sheet of paper on the table. The main goal is to have it readily available for people to scan, which they can do using their native camera app on most smartphones.

After the person scans the QR code, all room controls appear on their smartphone, including for audio and video. With the controls on their device, people can continue to use meeting rooms as they return to work without the worry of touching shared devices.

Q-SYS Controls AV, But It’s Meant for IT

While there are many solutions for technology management and control on the market, Q-SYS

stands out from the rest because of its ability to scale and centralize AV equipment. Naturally, the benefits come with a cost — but given the way Q-SYS works with companies like Zoom, Shure, Sennheiser and others, it’s worthwhile to consider how it could operate within your current infrastructure.

During this return-to-work phase, IT managers must focus their efforts on developing a strategic plan that will enable their organization to flourish in its “new normal,” all while keeping employees engaged and connected. If you have questions on the Q-SYS Ecosystem or other touchless meeting room solutions, schedule a time at your convenience to contact us. Our AV experts are here to help.