Is your workplace attracting staff and enabling your teams to succeed?

This article is part of our Opinions section.

Our working environments have changed dramatically over the last few years. The hybrid working environment requires us to be in more meetings than before the Covid era, and we need to ensure our staff can collaborate effectively, wherever they are. Working from home provides great individual flexibility, but it does hamper social interactions and team building. Some may feel they miss, the opportunity to learn from others and to collaborate with other teams.

So how do we ensure that our staff, clients and external parties can work together with agility, and excellence while maintaining a positive office culture?

From my time discussing this with many organisations, mandating a blanket return to office is not the way to achieve these goals. Success is found by finding a way to create the desire to bring teams back together.

This cannot be done in isolation though. These challenges require collaboration across the business, including IT, HR, facilities, estates, compliance and infosec, working together to make the office a magnet for staff, while fulfilling the needs of the business.

This requires us to reimagine what the working environment should look like for your business. Consider the fact that it will be hybrid working and as such this changes how staff work compared to how they did previously. Some key things to immediately discuss between these departments and the management teams are:

• Make the office a hub for collaboration and team bonding
• Consider how many meeting rooms would be needed (this is likely to be more than previously) Do you need different types and sizes of meeting rooms? Huddle spaces, small meeting rooms, training rooms, boardroom
• Do you still need static desk assignments for each individual employee or team? Should you adopt a dynamic, open office environment supported by an intuitive desk booking system?
• Think about the desk quantities; it’s likely you won’t have a desk for every employee if you have a defined home/office working policy
• Will you need pods to accommodate private calls?

Hybrid workforce: keeping them involved in meetings

That’s some of the physical space considerations, but when thinking of your meeting rooms, keep in mind, that most meetings will still have hybrid participants (98% according to recent research from both Cisco and Microsoft!). How do we ensure everyone in those meetings feels involved and connected regardless of where they are joining from?

Before Covid, most meetings were in person and rarely involved a remote participant. Even more so, when they did, it was unlikely to involve video, and you were likely to have had full control of the end-to-end platform being used. Now depending on if the call is internal, with clients or third parties, it can result in various platforms being needed to be used, ranging from Webex, Teams, Zoom, Google Meet and a range of others. As such we need to ensure the systems, we use in these meeting rooms can work natively with multiple platforms.

The design and capability of these rooms are also of critical importance, we cannot simply place a camera and a screen at one end of the room and expect the best audio and visual quality for all. So much of the value of video-enabled meetings comes from non-verbal elements; facial expressions and other visual cues.

This is why it is important with hybrid meetings to give everyone an equitable share of virtual screen real estate.

If you are in a meeting room with one or more 65-inch screens, you probably get a good view of participants in another room, and remote individual participants (although the latter may take an “unfair” proportion of the screen with legacy video systems). Think about the remote participants – maybe they are using their laptop display or a modest-sized external monitor at home. If half of their screen shows another remote user and the other half a meeting room with eight people in, they will struggle to see the details of those users.

Bear in mind, that there is no “one size fits all” in meeting room systems. In the examples shown, we need to use multiple screens, cameras and microphones to deliver that equitable, collaborative experience. A camera with a wide field of view to pick up two users sitting close to the camera in a huddle space, is not going to frame the CEO sitting at the far end of a 20-seat board table, nor follow a presenter moving about on stage delivering training to in-person and remote attendees.

Having all those system components work together, focusing on those speaking, or specific areas helps deliver that engaging experience for the far end. But we can’t just switch to focus on whatever last made a sound. It needs to be smart, recognise human faces (but not photos on the wall) and identify human speech, isolating background noise such as air conditioning, typing or sirens from vehicles on the road below.

Device management in a hybrid world

The final point I wanted to make is about management. We have a thoughtfully designed office environment and some great technology in the meeting rooms that allow us to collaborate effectively. But how we manage all this technology should not be an afterthought. We have a number of elements to manage;

• Devices – software and firmware get updated. How do we apply that to dozens, or hundreds of meeting spaces, perhaps spread around the globe?
• Platform – Tied closely with devices in many scenarios, but when a new version of the platform is released are we ready for it? Can we manage the maintenance window, and schedule for quiet times in differing timezones?
• Peripherals – Everything worked fine yesterday, but we had a visitor in Meeting Room 6 who wanted to connect their laptop and pulled an HDMI cable out. Someone changed the display to enhance the picture, thinking they would make it look better, but the processing involved is causing lip sync delays in video calls. How do we know that from thousands of miles away?

Consider the management options for your chosen devices and platform. Some require additional software to manage devices, others are natively managed by the cloud meeting platform and not all the capabilities outlined above are in all solutions. Organisations with a geographically diverse presence in particular need to ensure the management platform gives them eyes and ears in all their rooms, even where no support staff are located. The loudest voices are always the senior executive or fee earner that can’t join a meeting and it’s your problem now.

In conclusion, by thoughtfully designing and implementing the right meeting room solutions, you can create an inclusive, engaging, and seamless experience for all participants, whether they are physically present or joining remotely.

I encourage you to examine your current setups, consider the points discussed, and explore how you can enhance your office and meeting room environments to foster better collaboration and productivity.

Related reading

• New Office IT Setup Checklist
• Michael Cockburn, CEO at Desana: “No matter what you do, get a great accountant!”
• Cisco eyes hybrid workforce with new collaboration hardware