Businesses of all shapes and sizes are now evaluating how to strike the right balance between giving their staff the freedom and flexibility they’ve come to expect as a result of the Covid pandemic whilst ensuring that teams can come together to collaborate and benefit from an office. To achieve this the office must deliver a working environment that provides productive spaces in a way that remote working cannot offer.

One of the key parts of a business’s decision for the future of work is what to do with the office meeting spaces? From the huddle space to the board room, there is now the immediate need to equip spaces to allow for both in-room meeting and collaboration and, more importantly, for remote participants to feel seen, heard and contribute creatively, all supported by a platform that can flow seamlessly from the desktop to the biggest meeting space. The simplistic answer to the above need would be to select audio and video equipment allied to systems and processes plus incorporate the fundamentals of good room design to deliver simple-to-use, easy to operate rooms.

This should be straightforward but all too often, enterprises fall into the trap of starting with their choice of hardware and then attempting to make the technology fit the meeting space, the type of work done, or most often, both. This approach will almost always result in a poor experience because all spaces have different features, characteristics and uses. To ensure optimal performance there is no single solution that should be fitted across every meeting room in an enterprise.

Enterprises should instead be focusing on who uses the space and what each workspace is used for. Perhaps the biggest mindset shift is the need for a fundamental re-imaging of what a meeting space is really catering for. With almost every meeting having at least one remote attendee, the video meeting is now the primary element that the rest of the room should be designed around. The fundamentals of traditional AV design still exist but the need for remote attendees to see and hear what’s going on in the room perfectly is more important than ever. The 190 degree pivot is that features such as lighting and acoustics need designing from the perspective of the remote users.

“The mantra should be: people, place, process and then the technology will define itself,” confirms Andy Byett, a collaboration architect at Resonate. “We find clients are often lured in by the latest tech, but they need to take a step back and think about how to design rooms to get the best productivity and to ensure the experience for the far-end is as good as possible.

At Resonate, we align with our clients’ key objectives and work to identify their different meeting personas. We’ll look at the spaces they’re using and from there, look to curate a selection of meeting room solutions that can be deployed at scale that fit all their needs whilst ensuring that rooms are managed with the dedicated service that is the core of our business.”

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

The reality is one-size-fits-all simply doesn’t work in the real world. Deployments need to encompass the specific requirements of each room in order to ensure users’ buy into the space. The stakes for getting this wrong are high because if users can’t do their work or the far end struggle to even hear and see, they are not properly utilised and quickly the blame game begins internally as to why time and money has been apparently wasted on a poor solution. Whatever the reason for failure, ultimately the whole business will suffer.

“We were brought in by a multinational food manufacturer which paused its global Microsoft Teams Rooms rollout because of a series of complaints to management about room quality,” adds Byett.

“We quickly discovered that the project had been focusing on the technology alone and the space dynamics and how employees wanted to use the rooms has not been considered.

We worked with the customer to design a series of room standards, looking at the people, place and technology and helped the client deliver the first 30 rooms, resulting in reduced complaints and higher room utilisation. The global rollout is now back on.”

This turnaround emphasises the importance of adopting a Microsoft Teams Rooms rollout strategy that goes beyond simply putting technology in rooms for users. Instead, the technology should be deployed that matches how rooms are used and the ways in which the users want to access and adopt the technology.



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