The Importance of Meeting Room Standardization
With the impact of the pandemic and the growing emergence of the hybrid workforce, meetings have become vital in supporting a productive work environment. Many factors can impact meeting productivity but technology has become essential with the growing need to conduct hybrid meetings that offer a similar experience for those in-person and virtual. When not planned out and streamlined, technology can often act as a disrupter (equipment from different providers, multiple user interfaces, etc.) with many employees feeling that they are likely to experience technical issues during meetings. The best way to combat this is through standardization amongst all your meeting rooms, helping create more engaging meetings that don’t waste time from setting-up technology or dealing with tech-related issues.
Reasons to Standardize
Troubleshooting
Standardizing your meeting room technology will make troubleshooting any issues easier for your IT department. By mastering one system, responsibilities for your IT staff will decrease, and it will be easier to fix glitches and perform system updates. With how tedious troubleshooting can be, streamlining your technology will allow your IT staff to respond to issues quicker when working with one consistent system.
Productivity
Obviously, any time saved dealing with technology issues or set-up can be time spent collaborating and working efficiently during meeting times. By streamlining your meeting rooms, employees can enter any space and begin work immediately while quickly bringing in remote employees into any meeting. Stopping and starting during sessions often disrupt the flow and can be difficult when brainstorming or coming up with creative solutions. The easier you make it for your employees to connect and go, the better the performance and results will be.
Training
The longer employees use a system, the better they will be at it. By standardizing meeting room technology, employees will spend less time training because they will only need to learn one platform instead of learning an entirely new system in each meeting room.
How Do You Standardize?
Understand Your Needs
Doing a complete audit of each room and understanding what you’re currently working with is essential. During this process, you may learn that you do not need to bring in something entirely new and may be able to provide enhancements to the current network. Make sure to survey or talk with your employees, in-person and remote, about how they use these rooms and their current issues. If most employees seem comfortable with Teams, it may not be to your advantage to go with something different, like Zoom. This process ensures you don’t invest in unwanted equipment and that your budget is best spent on technology that will benefit your network of meeting rooms.
Streamline Purchases
Management will need to be responsible for purchasing all required technology for meeting rooms and departments, and individuals cannot buy anything separately for these rooms. Allowing this activity would make it harder to streamline the experience and could lead to wasting money on technology that is never used. Upper management needs to be responsible for testing and approving all technology purchases for the meeting rooms, making sure it fits within the current network.
Think of the Future
It’s vital to make sure the technology you choose can adapt quickly over time and keep up with the growing needs of your organization. Software-based solutions offer flexibility and can easily be upgraded over time. It is also essential to provide additional training and resources for employees to adapt to any upgrades to the system.
Are you ready to standardize your meeting rooms? Contact us to help conduct an audit and receive recommendations on the technology that will work best for you!
