Revenge of the Survivor's Guide for the Zombie Meeting Room
Joe Berger, World Wide Technology's Collaboration Practice Director, authored a series of blog posts for No Jitter on how to get rid of the "zombie meeting room" in an organization's office space.
Posted by No Jitter on September 18, 2017:
In in my previous blog post, "A Survivor's Guide for the Zombie Meeting Room," I argued why companies must double-down on conference room technology to better capitalize on the new ways people work. Treating these rooms as just rooms only limits the collaboration and productivity of your employees; a zombie meeting room only produces zombie workers.
Now I will go into the different ways to bring these rooms back to life.
Building Collaboration From the Ground Floor Up
From my frontline experience, I would say convincing a company on the value of smart meeting rooms is one of the biggest challenges of many collaboration projects. Most neither understand what the technology can do, nor see the point of building out physical conference rooms when work is shifting to virtual spaces. However, getting folks into a testing environment where they can validate the technology and put it through the proper paces can really be an eye-opening experience. A common takeaway from these sessions is how the physical and the virtual are interconnected.
Smart conference rooms can be a reliable hub for workers connecting remotely, facilitating meetings that are open, clear, and rich with features for everyone inside and outside of the room. Investing in smart meeting rooms is an investment in the foundation for virtual collaboration.
The perfect opportunity to invest is when you're shifting to an open floor plan, expanding to a new building, or remodeling your current campus. By starting fresh, you can integrate the technology into the very DNA of the space to produce a comprehensive meeting experience native to the environment. Video collaboration, room reservation, lighting, climate control, and file sharing can all be tied together and made available through one unified interface.