With 90% of companies now saying they’re planning on adopting “hybrid” work in the years ahead, several new purchasing choices are made. 

Perhaps the most critical step for businesses investing in their future workforce is figuring out how to enable and empower the age of hybrid meetings. Designed to align employees and inspire collaboration regardless of distance, hybrid meeting rooms bridge the gaps between different kinds of team members. 

Hybrid meeting room kits are all-in-one solutions custom-made to simplify the migration to hybrid collaboration and conferencing with plug-and-play convenience. The right hybrid meeting room kit can be a valuable investment in your company culture and an opportunity to minimise the risk of “second-hand citizens” in your workforce. 

Let’s look at why your company should invest in hybrid meeting room kits in 2022.

  1. Quick, Agile, and Easy Meeting Room Design

In the past, designing a meeting room environment in a business landscape was a complex and expensive endeavour. Often, companies spent a fortune on the right cameras, speakerphones, microphones, and screens and paid for the expertise required to link these tools together.

Hybrid meeting room kits eliminate a significant amount of this complexity and expense, by creating a plug-and-play solution for conferencing. Companies get everything they need to empower their teams with simplicity baked in with an all-in-one kit. There’s usually very little need for professional setup and provisioning, so teams can instantly start meeting.

What’s more, these meeting rooms are designed to be as flexible and agile as possible. In the age of hybrid work, teams need to be able to set up a meeting room from anywhere. Plug-and-play simplicity makes it possible to turn any room into a conference space. 

  1. Improve Team Inclusivity

Notably, hybrid meeting room kits don’t just give businesses the tools to connect hybrid employees; they also offer the technology required to bridge the gap between staff. Lack of inclusivity and equity is a significant concern for many companies shifting to hybrid work. Remote employees often feel like second-class citizens when they’re outside of the office and unable to engage in face-to-face conversations.

A hybrid meeting room kit can help to reduce this issue by allowing teams to implement tools that make staff members feel more involved, wherever they are. As Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, says, the technology should make everyone feel like a “first-class participant”. 

Hybrid meeting rooms can come with intelligent cameras that help align employees’ vision in a room space, so it seems as though they’re making constant eye contact. The same tools can allow companies to use shared applications to ensure that team members working remotely can write on the same screen or interact with the same content as colleagues in the office through a mobile app. 

  1. Strengthen Collaboration

Hybrid meeting room kits pave the way for a more collaborative workforce in several different ways. First, with the right technology, anyone in your business will be able to set up a meeting and launch a collaborative session in minutes – without waiting for an IT team. This makes collaborating with team members wherever they feel more natural and convenient.

Secondly, hybrid meeting room kits are specially designed to bring teams together in a distributed environment. This means they come with a variety of tools to encourage participation. Most kits will already come pre-installed with the software you already use for sharing content and collaborating on tasks, like Microsoft Teams. 

Tools like whiteboards that connect to a mobile app for real-time annotations and contributions can help to improve collaboration too. At the same time, companies can leverage software solutions that allow their employees to take over the position of the “head of a meeting” whenever they need to, moving the focus back and forth between remote and in-office teams.

  1. Improved Technology Adoption

Currently, around 76% of employees say their companies have shifted into a hybrid work environment. However, many companies are still in the initial stages of figuring out how their hybrid ecosystem will work. To ensure teams can continue working effectively together in this hybrid landscape, organisations need to provide a high level of adoption.

Hybrid meeting room kits are perfect for improving your chances of rapid adoption of new technology. They’re designed to be easy for anyone to use, so you don’t have to provide your employees with excess training on leveraging the room kit. 

At the same time, many of these kits are designed to be flexible and customisable. Some allow users to plug in their own preferred meeting service, while others allow for the connection of additional tools to expand the size of the meeting room. 

  1. Cost Savings

While the shift to an entirely new way of working is likely to have some expenses, switching to a hybrid meeting environment doesn’t have to be as costly as most people think. By embracing room kits, you can minimise the costs of investing in individual pieces of expensive equipment by buying everything in a bundle.

You’ll also be able to reduce the expenses associated with installing and maintaining your new technology, as you should be able to handle the majority of the work in-house. All the while, you’re saving money on having to have every employee in your office simultaneously.

Some companies offering hybrid room kits are even beginning to provide new options for the way you can access these tools, like “Rooms as a service”, if you want to pay a subscription fee for your room devices rather than buying everything upfront. 

  1. Better Employee Experiences

Finally, to keep your team members engaged and focused in today’s ever-changing workplace, you need to deliver fantastic user experiences. Today’s employees expect the technology they use in the office to be just as intuitive as the solutions outside of the office. 

With room kits, you can create a more immersive environment where everyone can set up a meeting and start collaborating in no time. Room kits also give your employees a sense of safety by allowing your company to invest in solutions like contactless controls to reduce the spread of bacteria. 

As the tools available in hybrid room kits continue to evolve, you may even be able to enhance the user experience even further, with the introduction of new AI assistants to aid your teams, and extended reality for in-depth collaboration. 

 

 



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