How organisations can make hybrid working work
Remote working
"I think there's very little doubt that remote working is here to stay for most... but hybrid working means a mixture of people coming into the office and working remotely." Says Jon Knight
"The most commonly predicted strategy for this is what people are calling a 2-2-1 strategy. So, two days at home, two days in the office or out and about visiting customers, and then one day that might be flexible.
If that prediction is correct for most - and again there will be differences where some people will work more remotely, others will come more into the workplace - but if that general prediction is correct, then this creates a massive challenge for a lot of organisations. And the first challenge it is going to create is the quality of the meeting room audio."
Meeting room audio
Jon continues, "The second thing that we predict happening as another future trend in relation to supporting ongoing remote working, is the need to address visual collaboration. So, again this is going to be something that will come out later this year, as organisations start to have to adopt hybrid where we're going to hear about employees saying: “I can hear you, I can see you, but I can't see what you're talking about. I can't see the whiteboard you're working on. I can't participate in what's going on within that meeting space”.
Meeting rooms need to evolve to suit hybrid working. Meetings will become more collaborative, with people no longer tied to the meeting room table as they write notes on a chart, or annotate on an interactive display. How do you ensure that remote participants hear you clearly as you move around?
The Nureva HDL series solves this problem. Rather limiting microphone pick up to a specific part of the room (normally the meeting room table), the HDL series features patented Microphone Mist technology, which fills the room with thousands of 'virtual microphones', ensuring that you can be heard anywhere in the room. Microphone Mist is constantly listening to the room acoustics and adapting microphone to eliminate background noise, so are perfect for rooms with flexible layouts,
Meeting room collaboration
Hybrid working also requires flexible meeting rooms. With the majority of people having worked from home for months, they have become used to joining meetings through a variety of UC platforms. Every organisation has their standards, but when meeting with outside companies, they may be a Webex house, whilst you may have Teams. Using traditional communication tools, meeting using different clients was a challenge involving bridges and gateways, and the results were not always great.
Today, equipping your meeting room with a Windows system loaded with various UC clients gets around this issue, but presents different challenges. How do you make it simple for users to access the software and provide continuity of solutions across your meeting room estate?
The answer is Valarea : a software application that resides on your meeting room PC's and provides a simple, easy to use interface for all your meeting room activities. One touch to join for over 30 of the leading UC solutions, powerful screen sharing through standard casting applications, collaboration with in room and remote participants with enhance whiteboard functions.
Users can pre-book a meeting room, and Valarea will display the invitation and automatically launch the appropriate UC client; or users can scan a code with their mobile device to transfer their personal calendar to the meeting room. Plus users can authenticate the cloud based storage to bring their own data to the meeting.
Valarea offers a simple, intuitive, yet incredibly powerful interface to your meetings rooms, giving a consistent experience, regardless of the in-room hardware. Single or dual screens; passive or interactive displays, even projection solutions are all supported, so users have a uniform experience whatever room they use.
Valarea also offers administrators powerful tools to manage your meeting rooms. Push commands remotely to the rooms if users are having difficulties, automatically update software and user detailed analytics to ensure your rooms are being used effectively.
Valarea speeds up meetings by making them quick to join, simple to collaborate and easy to manage.
Valarea can be trialed for free here.
How as an organisation have you thought about this staff flexibility? Not every one in at once can create its own issues. If desk numbers are reduced due to social distancing how will visiting numbers be controlled? Will colleagues be able to sit next to each other? How will meeting room availability be solved?
These are all key questions as we move to a hybrid way of working, whether that be a 2-2-1 or 3-2 split management of space is critical to a successful working model. The provision of desk and room booking solutions smooth the transition from home working to workplace working.
Desk and Room Booking
The GoBright platform consists of several modules, which can be used in your organisation:
Find out how simple it is to book a desk using the GoBright app, or a room using the Outlook plugin.
Ascentae and their partners offer TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS TO SUPPORT THE FUTURE WORKPLACE
