More now than ever before, the primary purpose of the office is to create, facilitate and maximize CONNECTION. Connection to your co-workers and teams. Connection to your customers. Connection to your company’s culture and values. Connection to your organization’s vision for a bigger, better, brighter future (one can hope!). In today’s hybrid world, the office must evolve to become a (the?) critical connection hub for the business. It is where people literally come to see and be seen, and to connect in those serendipitous hallway or water cooler interactions that simply don’t happen over Teams or Zoom. But, not everyone can be present all the time. And, in a global organization, we have these office connection hubs all over the world, so we need to effectively connect these hubs together in effective ways to ensure all this wonderful connection is supported on a global level – this is challenging stuff!
Meeting space technologies and the connective experiences they create are essential to support this mission of the office. How do we make sure this is executed in an effective and efficient manner, to ensure that we can successfully enable these connections in any space from the huddle room to the boardroom to the multi-purpose cafe, and beyond? The answer starts with creating consistent and repeatable user experiences. Before diving into that, let’s consider the flip side: what is the biggest annoyance for many employees as they return to the office? I’d argue it is walking into a meeting room and battling a legacy meeting room system that wasn’t designed for hybrid Teams or Zoom calls where half the meeting attendees are remote and/or are distributed across other offices. And then walking down the hall to a different meeting room later in the day and having a completely different meeting set-up experience than the previous room. So, how do we resolve this? Thankfully, Teams Room and Zoom Room systems, and even the BYOD Teams and Zoom experiences, have come a long, long way in helping resolve this. But beyond the platform of choice, the technology in the room needs to be consistent in experience, and ideally is also consistent with experience one has when joining that meeting from their home office. Again, the platforms and aligned AV collaboration technology manufacturers (Logitech, Jabra, Poly, etc.) have largely solved this with scalable systems that support deployment of consistent and repeatable experiences regardless of the room size and AV & IT system complexity.
So, what’s next once we’ve chosen a UCC platform and supporting technology vendor? Well, let’s look back at those connections we are trying to enable with the workplace. We have now checked the “connecting co-workers and teams” box, but still have other ideal connections to make – to culture and to vision. How do we enable this? Well, if you attended InfoComm 2024, you hopefully heard a lot about Workplace Experience technologies and platforms – this is the next great venture for AV & IT to connect and enable the workplace to achieve these next level goals of connecting our people with our culture and our vision for the future. If you want to enhance your office to truly be a connection hub that will not only connect people with each other, but also more broadly with your organization’s culture and vision, while enabling more productive workplace experiences for your teams, then you need to think beyond just the meeting room. Platforms like Appspace and Microsoft Places are now available to more broadly connect how you manage and connect your people to the workplace, integrating meeting room and desk scheduling (for hoteling & hot-desking environments), digital communications including wayfinding, branding & messaging, and visitor management and engagement. Investing in these platforms helps connect your people with your culture, helping ensure your spaces live and breathe your brand, your vibe, and your ideals in a nimble, digital manner that is flexible and adaptable over time (unlike that old static sign that you haven’t updated in 7 years that still has your old logo and brand language!).
Then, what’s next? How do we go one step further and connect people with our vision for the future? These workplace experience platforms can engage with occupancy intelligence platforms and sensor networks provided by vendors like VergeSense to understand and optimize the workplace based on workplace people movement and space utilization, optimizing long-term corporate real estate portfolio-level management. CRE leaders like JLL and CBRE, and large corporations like Microsoft are leveraging the vast amount of data provided by occupancy intelligence networks to optimize portfolio-level real estate and site-level office design decisions to maximize the workplace experience of their customers and employees around the world. This supports your ability to not only engage in the here and now, but also understand and communicate what’s coming next in the workplace. By taking a continuous-improvement approach to your workplace investment – treating the workplace not as a fixed, one-time investment, but as one that is in a constant “beta” release state, you show your organization that you’re focused on innovating their employee experience at the workplace in a way that drives long-term value, enhancing how your teams connect and collaborate now and continuing to do so into the future.
Are you considering how best to optimize your workplace experience to maximize connection opportunities for your teams? If so, consider at what level you’re hoping to drive connection:
- Level 1 – Connecting People with People: At this level, your focus is on enhancing how people connect with each other from the office, remotely, from anywhere around the world. Your focus should be on ensuring you’re selecting a meeting platform (i.e. Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Cisco WebEx, etc.) and conferencing & collaboration technology solutions that create consistent and repeatable experiences room-to-room and site-to-site, so your team can walk into an office in St. Louis, New York or London and have a consistent experience. Room systems certified for Teams Rooms and Zoom Rooms from many of the leading manufacturers solve elegantly for this.
- Level 1.5 – Connecting People with People at Scale: Depending on your organizational scale, also consider how your Facilities or AV/IT teams will manage deployment of these rooms licenses and system integrations. If you have a large-scale organization with many rooms across many sites, consider selecting a vendor that also provides deployment management software (i.e. Logitech Sync or Jabra’s Jabra+) to efficiently manage these solutions at scale.
- Level 2 – Connecting People with AI-Enabled Insights: Are you making investments to bring AI-enabled insights into your workflows? Are you considering how Chat-GPT, Copilot, etc. can enhance productivity and improve meeting outcomes? If so, then you need to consider the next level of meeting space solutions that ensure you’re leveraging the best that AI technology can bring to the connection experience. With investments in AI integrations into Microsoft Teams and Zoom, you can leverage AI to personally annotate, translate and transcribe meeting minutes, create detailed action items lists, and beyond. If this added layer of intelligence is desired to enhance and overlay your meeting connections, then you need to consider investing in the premium-level offerings from Microsoft and Zoom that bring these offerings to the table.
- Level 3 – Connecting People with Culture: At this level, consider investing in a Workplace Experience platform like Appspace, Microsoft Spaces, Logitech Sync, Robin or others that enable more than just the meeting space as a means of connecting people together. With the ability to easily manage meeting room, desktop and other spaces, and enhance with digital content that connect people with your culture and brand, this further enables your workplace evolution to best connect your people with your cultural identity.
- Level 4 – Connecting People with Vision: At the pinnacle of the workplace experience, you are interested in not just connecting people with each other and with your organization’s cultural identity, but also with leveraging data to connect your people and your workplace with who you want to grow to become in the future. This investment level requires a continuous improvement approach to the workplace investment, with the understanding that a great workplace, just like your organization, is constantly evolving to meet the latest wants and needs of your workforce, of your customers and of the value your organization brings to the world. Deploying occupancy intelligence platforms like VergeSense further enables Level 2 workplace experience platforms with data-driven insights that allow you to make continuous adjustments to optimize your workplace and communicate your vision for the future of work at your organization.
The ecosystem of conferencing & collaboration platforms, intelligent AI-enabled meeting space technologies, workplace experience platforms and occupancy intelligence is evolving quickly. Use these 4 levels of connection to help you and your organization define the ideal investment you need to make to connect your organization at the appropriate level for your goals. Also, be sure to keep an eye on this ecosystem as it continues to evolve to be sure your organization is ready when the time comes for a potential change in approach. Best of luck in enhancing connection outcomes in your workplace, at whatever level of approach is right for you.
David Albright
With a deep passion for the intersection of people, place and technology, David has spent most of his career focused on developing products that enhance the workplace. His passion for technologies that enhance human connection and productivity is infectious and inspiring, and he enjoys sharing insights on the workplace experience with those across the AV, IT and Commercial Design industries. Outside of work, you'll likely find him on a soccer field as a cheering dad or friendly referee.
