As return to work strategies start to drive workers back to the office for greater percentages of their time, traditional office spaces need to rethink the new blend of on-site, remote and home-working personnel they serve. A key goal is to achieve meeting equality whereby each participant has access to the same features and is given the same level of influence and participation as those in the room. The days of passively parking remote colleagues on a single screen at one end of a meeting room table now look out of date and no longer fit the needs or expectations of workers.

“Videoconferencing has gone through a series of cycles over the last three decades, and in some ways, it’s back where it began with the room being perhaps more important than the technology it contains,” explains Andy Porter, a strategic account director in the international videoconferencing unit of New Era Technology. “We’ve seen the cost-prohibitive dedicated conferencing suites and  the poor quality cathode ray tube on trolley experiences and, most recently, videoconferencing becoming a commodity.”

Return to Office

“It’s only now people are returning to the office that the conference room itself has been recognized as still being important,” he adds. “It’s clear that the experience will be better for those in the meeting room so the drive over the last 12 months has been to provide equity of experience.”

Porter points out that the imbalance isn’t all one-way. Physical meeting attendees lack features such as chat that remote colleagues can use to collaborate during a meeting. Therefore, systems that enable richer experiences that enable greater and more natural integration between all meeting participants across multiple channels are needed.

“The importance of meeting design is now increasingly well understood,” says Porter. “Microsoft now offers its Signature Teams Room experience, which sets out the angle of the table, the size of the display, and how the room’s cameras work.”

Room Design goes Beyond Technology

Design isn’t only about the technology now. Porter says rooms increasingly are designed to consider acoustics and camera angles. “Designers now treat acoustic performance with equal importance to the video devices alongside lighting and furniture choices that help to optimise the experience. You won’t see so many glass tables and glass walls for this reason,” he explains.

“The hardware has certainly become more intelligent with videoconferencing cameras now adopting artificial intelligence to detect the faces of participants and zoom to show people who are talking.”

This functionality has previously been available but has been slightly too slow to provide a natural, immersive experience. Now though, the technology has caught up with users’ requirements, and  multiple larger screens, improved microphone performance and optimised room layouts  augment the advances in camera technology.

“You can now have participants presented as individual tiles with their eye-levels all the same and presented similarly to everyone else on the call,” says Porter. “Logitech, I feel, is leading the way here in facial identification to present the name of individuals. Hardware such as the Logitech Sight Camera works on a 360-degree pod in the centre of the meeting room table and as a camera at the front of the room. This enables multiple views of participants to be taken and a far more dynamic experience as the cameras blend multiple sources.”

Innovation and Traditional Tools Merge

This level of sophistication helps to bring remote participants into the conference and an array of additional tools further supports this. Logitech, for example, offers a camera on a stalk that can be directed at a whiteboard so the board’s content can be shared easily with remote users.

New Era Technology is keen to make its experience of deploying richer videoconferencing experiences available to customers as they execute on  their return-to-work strategies. “The office is now about providing the space to allow people to collaborate, and  we are seeing increasing numbers of office moves and re-designs,” he says.

“We’re seeing company town hall and audition spaces being created, which have been developed for videoconferencing. The whole company will be able to participate, and employers recognise this is needed to make the return appealing and to keep remote fully engaged and able to access similar functionality as office-based workers. Everyone is having this conversation now because office spaces now cannot be how they were before the pandemic.”

To find out more, visit New Era Technology.



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