As experts in communication and collaboration, we’ve seen countless meeting room trends come and go over the years. We’ve seen the rise, fall, and resurgence of huddle rooms, focus spaces, and even large conferencing rooms. We’ve witnessed the growth of video as a critical tool for communication and the introduction of new technologies for metaverse work.
Every time businesses take a new step towards the “future of work,” office design and meeting room space trends shift and evolve. In 2024, continued demand for hybrid and flexible work, technological innovation, and return-to-office requirements are influencing the landscape once again.
To help you adapt to the transformative workplace, we’re sharing some key trends influencing meeting room design in 2024 and beyond.
Major Meeting Room Trends in 2024
While the nature of the evolving meeting room will vary depending on a range of factors, from the size of your physical space to the structure of your workforce, some meeting room trends appear to impact countless companies significantly.
We chose these trends to highlight based on their impact on workplace productivity, engagement, and technology purchasing habits.
1. Immersive Meeting Room Trends
While the metaverse has yet to fully emerge as a mainstream part of the modern office, there’s a growing demand for immersive experiences in meeting rooms and collaborative settings. Though many employers are now encouraging staff members to re-enter the traditional office room environment, remote and hybrid work is still commonplace.
This means companies need ways to effectively bridge the gap between distributed employees, whether they’re connecting in-office staff to remote workers, customers, or field-based employees. Immersive technologies have the power to strengthen the link between distributed staff.
Virtual reality technologies built into a meeting room setting empower staff members to share content and work together on projects in a flexible virtual space, free from the restrictions of common office spaces. Augmented and mixed reality solutions can give employees a greater sense of presence in a meeting room through holographic displays and intelligent apps.
Immersive spaces can significantly improve employee relationships, enhance collaboration and productivity, and even improve creativity. They allow teams to work together on prototypes and ideas without wasting resources. As vendors continue to produce enterprise-focused hardware, like the Meta Quest 3 or Meta Quest Pro and Apple Vision Pro, this trend will continue to evolve.
2. The Increasing Presence of AI
Artificial Intelligence isn’t just responsible for some of the most significant meeting room trends today. AI is influencing every facet of the workplace. AI assistants are emerging in productivity tools, like Microsoft’s Copilot technology. They’re enhancing training initiatives, helping teams to automate repetitive tasks, and boosting workplace efficiency.
In the modern meeting room, AI can boost productivity and collaboration in various ways. Some of the most common AI tools in meeting rooms include:
- AI assistants: With voice recognition and natural language processing capabilities, smart assistants can streamline a range of meeting room activities. They can summarize meetings and conversations into a list of key action points, transcribe and translate discussions, and even suggest follow-up actions for employees.
- Intelligent cameras: AI-powered cameras, like those produced by Crestron, can enhance the quality of video meetings. They can automatically improve video quality, track a speaker as they move around a room, and even strengthen meeting room security with facial recognition. These tools can also position camera feeds and presentations in a way that improves feelings of inclusion in a hybrid workplace.
- AI Audio Solutions: Speakers and microphones enhanced by AI can eliminate unnecessary noise, improve voice quality, and improve meeting clarity. They can also include virtual assistants, which allow users to control elements of their meeting room hands-free.
3. The Impact of Flexibility on Meeting Room Trends
One of the significant factors influencing meeting room trends in 2024 is the rise of new types of employees in the workforce. Some studies show that as many as five generations of employees work together in the same company. Each has their own preferences and requirements to consider for technology, meeting room equipment, and experiences.
At the same time, numerous types of workers need to be able to participate in meeting environments, from hybrid and remote workers to mobile employees and in-office staff. Meeting rooms need to be inherently flexible to adhere to this new landscape.
Companies are equipping larger meeting spaces with flexible tools that can accommodate different types of workflows and both small and large teams. Focus rooms and smaller meeting spaces are being leveraged with the help of plug-and-play solutions, like all-in-one video bars.
Increasingly, bring your own meeting, and bring your own device solutions are also becoming more popular. These allow employees to connect to existing meeting room technology with their own choice of conferencing apps and devices (smartphones, tablets, etc).
Greater flexibility in the meeting room landscape ensures employees can access the environment that’s most suitable for their needs. It also helps to reduce business costs by ensuring teams can use pre-existing devices to connect with colleagues and customers.
4. The Transformation of Meeting Room Screens
Screens have always been an essential component of meeting room design for any organization. However, today’s meeting room trends push companies to look beyond simple screens that just “display” information. We’re seeing a rise in highly interactive and intelligent screen solutions that help to reduce operating costs and improve feelings of inclusion.
For instance, companies are investing in LED video walls that transform any meeting environment into an “immersive space.” These walls allow for rapid content sharing and collaboration while improving the sense of presence felt by remote employees.
Interactive screens, which can act as digital whiteboards for creative collaboration are also becoming increasingly popular. These allow employees to annotate documents and photos, record meetings, and brainstorm with remote team members in real time.
Companies are also investing in all-in-one screens that combine a display with a camera, speakers, and microphones. These comprehensive solutions can reduce the cost of creating the perfect meeting room and simplify setup and configuration for users.
5. AV Meeting Room Trends
Similar to screens, AV (Audiovisual) technology is a standard part of meeting room design. All meeting rooms need practical tools for sharing and accessing both audio and visual content. However, meeting room trends are reshaping how companies invest in AV tools.
First, there’s a growing demand for unified technology in the form of video bars and solutions that combine 4K video with speakers and microphones, minimizing the footprint of meeting room hardware. Moreover, these technologies are becoming more intuitive, supporting proper plug-and-play connectivity, so companies can spend less time configuring meeting spaces.
Video and audio systems are increasingly being equipped with software that offers companies access to AI and intelligent optimization and allows each user to personalize their meeting experience. What’s more, we’re seeing the rise of various add-on solutions designed to improve AV experiences.
Companies are combining full-room camera systems with document cameras and tools specially designed for presentations. Vendors are offering access to furniture and accessories that can enhance audio quality, like acoustic panels and digital signal processors.
The way companies purchase and deploy meeting room hardware is evolving, too. Companies offer pre-built kits configured for specific meeting room sizes and software (like Microsoft Teams). We’re even seeing companies offer pay-as-you-go access to meeting room technology on demand, allowing users to hire the technology they need for each interaction.
6. The Growing Focus on Comfort, Wellbeing, and Personalization
As disengagement and burnout continue to significantly impact employee productivity and staff retention, companies are focusing more heavily on employee experience. The need to create immersive, inclusive, and flexible spaces is also influencing meeting room trends.
We’ve already touched on the rise of software and hardware-agnostic solutions for meeting rooms, allowing companies to access their preferred devices and tools. However, companies are also looking for ways to improve employee comfort and wellbeing.
Sensors are emerging as a critical part of the meeting room technology stack, allowing companies to track everything from environmental factors in a meeting room to space occupancy levels. AI-powered software in meeting apps and hardware improves accessibility, giving users instant access to transcriptions, translations, and other supportive tools.
Companies are even rethinking how they design their meeting rooms to ensure employees not only feel a shared sense of presence (regardless of their location) but feel happy and productive in each environment.
Natural lighting, new ergonomic furniture, and other solutions for comfort are becoming more common. This trend is likely to grow, as companies struggle to attract and retain top talent in every industry.
7. Sustainability-driven Meeting Room Trends
In recent years, sustainability has evolved from a core focus of green eco-conscious businesses to a critical demand for every organization. Studies show that consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about the measures companies take to protect the environment.
Additionally, rising energy costs, economic uncertainty, and new regulations surrounding ESG initiatives are prompting organizations to invest more in sustainability. In the past, simple changes like switching to LED lighting or holding more paperless meetings may have been enough to adhere to the expectations of the government and your community.
Now, however, companies need to be more creative about how they enable sustainability. Creating highly inclusive meeting rooms that give remote and hybrid workers a sense of presence without the need for travel is an excellent first step.
However, companies can also invest in other solutions, like sustainable software that automatically shuts down meeting room technology when it’s not in use or sensors that monitor the resources used by each conference or interaction.
Even investing in technology made with sustainable materials, solutions designed to limit electricity usage, and “hired” meeting rooms can all reduce your level of electronic waste.
8. Transformative Meeting Room Software
While many of the major meeting room trends mentioned here have been related to hardware and room design, software for meeting rooms is evolving too. As companies strive to make the most of their investment, there’s a growing demand for smart booking and room management systems that help employees utilize resources more effectively.
The right meeting room management software can help businesses remotely track their systems’ health, update devices, and configure meeting room settings. It can help organizations monitor security and privacy issues that could harm their compliance standing. Plus, it can empower leaders to improve company culture.
Employees can even access apps and software that help them to track when certain people will be available in an office, so they know how to plan their desk and space usage more effectively. Moreover, companies can use the insights gleaned from meeting room software to determine how to invest in future solutions cost-effectively.
Collaboration software is also evolving, with the rise of immersive meeting room solutions like Microsoft Mesh for Teams and Immersive Spaces. We’re also seeing an increase in the number of technologies equipped with their own AI assistants, reporting tools, and real-time analytics.
The Trends Influencing the Modern Meeting Room
As the world of work continues to evolve, meeting room trends will grow alongside it. The way companies create, manage, and optimize meeting rooms has come a long way in recent years. Increasingly, conferencing and collaboration environments are becoming more flexible, more immersive, and more tuned to the needs of unique employees.
As we move into the years ahead and the workplace continues to change, we can expect meeting rooms to become ever more intuitive and valuable, transforming the connections between teams.
from UC Today https://ift.tt/6h1g5tw
0 Comments