Meeting rooms have come a long way in recent years.
Stuffy conference spaces are disappearing. Now, we have innovative, immersive, and inclusive spaces designed to connect in-house and remote employees and transform interactions.
The evolution of the workplace has led to a new era in conference room design. According to analysts Frost and Sullivan, this is exemplified by the introduction of a new category of meeting spaces: high-impact conference rooms.
Like the standard conference room, high-impact spaces can come in various shapes and sizes designed to facilitate various interactions. They can also feature a host of different technologies, from video conferencing equipment to extended reality tools and AI-powered tech.
The key difference? High-impact conference rooms are distinguished by their ability to deliver dynamic, flexible, and elevated user experiences, thanks to the support of the right software.
Defining High-Impact Conference Rooms
So, what exactly are high-impact conference rooms? According to Frost & Sullivan and their partners Q-SYS, high-impact spaces are dynamic, scalable meeting spaces that deliver immersive and engaging experiences for both in-room and remote participants.
They’re a new style of conference room designed to address the needs of staff members in a changing workplace environment. After all, today’s businesses cater to a range of employee personas, from remote and hybrid workers to mobile employees and in-office staff.
All of these team members need to communicate, collaborate, and share information seamlessly in an inclusive and empowering environment. Companies need to rethink how they design and manage these environments to build effective conference rooms.
A lot of traditional meeting spaces were equipped with technology based exclusively on their size. However, high-impact conference rooms are configured based on the goals companies want to achieve.
Creating a high-impact space means carefully considering the use cases for your meeting rooms and implementing hardware and software to help teams achieve their goals.
The Core Components of High-Impact Conference Rooms
Frost & Sullivan define “high impact spaces” as spaces built to deliver substantial, well-defined outcomes. These conference rooms gather stakeholders and large groups in flexible environments, like board rooms, executive spaces, training rooms, and auditoriums, promoting extensive collaboration and inclusion.
Most importantly, high-impact conference rooms must be dynamic, scalable, and sophisticated. They should include cutting-edge AV and control platforms and integrate seamlessly with employees’ collaboration tools, such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom.
Plus, these spaces need to be flexible enough to support a range of engagements, with features for things like multi-zone audio, video distribution, and room automation.
Features of High-Impact Spaces
The definition of high-impact conference rooms is relatively broad. So, companies have some freedom to experiment with the hardware and software they deploy. As mentioned above, high-impact spaces should always feature powerful AV technology and collaboration software that empowers staff to share content and knowledge with anyone.
Q-SYS and Frost & Sullivan have engaged with technology integrators, end-users, and conferencing service providers to define some of the critical features required for a high-impact space, such as:
- Automated technology: Automation is critical to a high-impact meeting space. it can help to improve meeting outcomes, and simplify collaboration. Some solutions, like automated multi-camera switching technology, also help with meeting room management.
- Room management software: Software that allows companies to monitor, upgrade, and manage meeting room technology is essential. Companies need to keep meetings on track with real-time status updates, event logs, and data.
- Hybrid collaboration tools: High-impact conference rooms are designed to bridge the gaps between all types of employees in a business. They need to simplify the process of creating seamless hybrid experiences, allowing remote attendees to access and share the same software and content as their in-office colleagues.
- Intuitive controls: High-impact spaces need to allow users to customize and adapt the AV experience for different requirements. Users should be able to adjust meeting room lighting, camera settings, audio solutions, and more in the same environment and control video, audio, and content streams.
- Artificial Intelligence: Working alongside automation, AI features can help enhance the experience in high-impact conference rooms. For instance, AI sensors can be used to trigger lighting changes or room configurations as soon as an employee walks into a room. They can also automatically track presenters during a conversation.
The Importance of Integration and Alignment
While the exact features of a high-impact conference room can vary, one non-negotiable element is exceptional integration and alignment. The ability to connect local and remote systems and ensure they operate synergistically is crucial. All the tools you use in a high-impact conference room must be linked, from professional-grade multi-zone audio to camera switching and control tools. You also need to ensure your meeting room can adapt and scale to your specific requirements.
High-impact spaces allow companies to fuse third-party technologies with audio, video, and control environments to create highly dynamic and multi-faceted meeting spaces. Historically, connecting all of a meeting room’s elements has caused challenges for IT departments.
Many AV solutions are built using specialized DSPs and proprietary ASICs, so they must be programmed with specialized languages. Multiplied across a range of systems and peripherals required in a high-impact space, this creates significant complexity.
That’s why vendors like Q-SYS, Lenovo, and various other innovators work together to create a seamless all-in-one solution for high-impact space management.
The Benefits of High-Impact Conference Rooms
So, what makes high impact conference rooms so valuable in today’s world? First, they address many challenges IT and AV professionals face when designing meeting rooms. Today, companies want to create meeting spaces that encourage employees back into the office, eliminating complexity and improving user experiences.
High-impact conference rooms help companies design and manage inclusive meeting environments more effectively. They ensure that organizations can boost connections between all employees in the modern workplace.
Features like beamforming ceiling microphones and camera switching remove friction from human interactions and create a space where everyone can participate and contribute. Used correctly, high-impact spaces can:
- Elevate the hybrid meeting experience, integrating seamlessly with hardware, collaboration platforms, and intelligent tools for boosting inclusion.
- Improve productivity by ensuring every employee has the tools to engage in specific tasks and achieve substantial, well-defined outcomes.
- Ensure companies can offer employees flexible meeting room experiences that adapt to specific use cases.
- Simplify meeting room management with unified tools for resource allocation, configuration, device management, and automation, reducing the need for IT and AV support.
- Enable transformation by allowing companies to experiment with different meeting room scenarios.
The Rise of High-Impact Conference Rooms
Analysts like Frost and Sullivan believe high-impact spaces will only continue to grow in prominence in the years ahead. By addressing the challenges teams face, they can enhance engagement and workplace inclusion.
According to the analysts, in 2022, there were more than 6.4 million high-impact spaces in the world. By 2025, this number will grow to over 11.3 million. In fact, high-impact spaces could account for 11% of all meeting room environments in the next two years.
Demand for high-impact environments will grow as companies continue transforming workplaces, focusing on employee engagement. These solutions will allow companies to democratize work, ensuring every employee has access to sophisticated solutions for collaboration.
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