After more than a few bad experiences and losing time that organizations will never get back, collaboration and meeting cultures are one of the most discussed workplace topics today. At its core, a meeting should be about sharing crucial information and coordinating action. If only it were that simple.
Whenever we bid to get a group of people in the same room, it can often feel like waiting for the planets to align. Even if you can find time in everyone’s calendar, there is still a long list of unwritten rules and challenges to overcome. Finding space in multiple calendars and space to host your meeting is typically just the beginning.
On top of the logistics, new research also looks at things like time of day based on energy levels and likelihood of employees being in office. According to a study by YouCanBookMe, a UK-based scheduling firm, Tuesday at 2:30pm is the best time in the week to book a meeting, based on over 2 million responses to 530 000 meeting invitations.
Throw a few technical glitches into the mix, and it’s easy to see why most companies run collaborative sessions as optimally as they could. The reality is that it’s not meetings that we hate, but poorly organized ones that halt productivity and leave you feeling tired or frustrated.
According to Atlassian, U.S. businesses alone waste $37 billion a year on unproductive meetings. However, this global problem is also a puzzling phenomenon because though solutions abound, the problem still persists. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, maybe we should try something different and eradicate bad meetings once and for all.
The road to more effective, productive, and collaborative meetings
The digital transformation is not just another buzzword – it is changing how we think both in and outside of the office. The global online collaboration market is expected to increase by 9% in 2019 to go beyond $45 billion. Emerging technologies are helping employees and customers unlock a continuous improvement mindset where they are creating new ways of reaching their meeting goals.
In addition, companies are already using AI in the workplace to enhance the human workforce. The Harvard Business Review report that over 1500 corporations are already deploying AI with human collaboration to complement one another’s strengths. Though AI is being implemented across the workplace, its benefits in collaboration are starting to present more obvious future ROI, thanks to 180° camera technology and its ability to canvas data from a room.
A few tech breakthroughs have enabled businesses to use their huddle-room video solutions as data-lake generators. There is extraordinary power in data lakes that most people don’t realize, but awareness is growing. When you synchronize, stitch and optimize video streams in real time from three non-distorting, ultra-high performance cameras you can create a full 180° video stream with high geometric fidelity, and this is what offers AI the best opportunity to make sense of the video information and create data from it.
Unlocking powerful data-driven insights from the day-to-day running of your meetings will reveal the secret ingredients that can change your meeting policies and make the dream of effective, productive, and collaborative meetings a reality.
Saving time and money
Advances like these can also use video data to automate control of projectors, TVs, climate control, and other powered devices in all of your meeting and huddle rooms when people are present or not. These adjustments will enable businesses to save massive energy expenditure by automating their power consumption in meeting room spaces.
With multinationals that currently have over 30000 of these types of spaces, energy consumption ROI has massive bottom-line potential.
Studies suggest a staggering 40% of room bookings result in an empty meeting room. Such events are usually triggered when someone cancels their meeting, but not the booking of the room. Meanwhile, almost everyone can relate to having desperately searched for a meeting room only to find none are available. Not only is this an inefficient use of meeting room space, but it also has a knock-on effect to the productivity of entire teams. As you automate workflows, you utilize resources better, which increases employee satisfaction. RoomsToEscape found that effective communication systems help in retaining the best talents by as much as 4.5 times.
Meanwhile, almost everyone can relate to having desperately searched for a meeting room only to find none are available.
Do the math
Though most businesses are currently attempting to enhance digital customer experiences with big data insights, many aren’t fully aware of the ability to do the same to their collaboration spaces in a way that affects their bottom line.
Imagine if you’re just data logging in a particular space; how often and how many people use a space, down to the seconds. Or you aggregate that over a broader time horizon. Now you have a huge repository of anonymized data that you can mine for insights and business intelligence.
You can also run multiple-variable analysis, comparing numbers of people in a room to meeting length times or time of day. By approaching old problems with data driven insights you can determine the optimal times in a day to run efficient meetings.
Every office is surrounded by a wealth of data that has the power to retire bad meetings once and for all. Rather than carrying on with the entrenched way of doing things, perhaps it’s time to do something different.
Understanding the best time to schedule a meeting, getting the tech right, and finding a meeting or huddle room are all problems that can be solved right now. Anonymized people data could be the key to unlocking your team’s productivity and replacing bad meetings with collaborative experiences.
And finally, your tech investment answers a very typical question of companies who make any investment in new meeting room spaces; are they really used and are they used as they are designed? Now you have very precise data on how you can use this space.
