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Webinar on August 12: Digital Messaging Solutions From NEC

AV Everywhere

Many businesses and schools will soon be welcoming employees back to work and campus. Do you have a plan and the right digital tools in place to communicate your health protocols?

During this webinar hosted by Commercial Integrator and AVI-SPL, and presented by NEC Display Solutions, you’ll get insight into:

  • Relevant digital signage tools and solutions for the current environment
  • Proper communication tools for sharing important safety and health instructions
  • Safety concerns as they pertain to crowd control and people congregating

You’ll also get insight into NEC Display Solutions that include the latest innovative technology to get your message out clearly and efficiently. You’ll see examples of solutions like the NEC A Series LED poster, which can deliver health and travel alerts, government communications, retail messaging, and simple instructions so that you reach your audience quickly with accurate information.

Register for “Digital Messaging Solutions for Your Post-COVID-19 Business Environment” >

To view our Partner blog, click here

How to Create and Host Successful Virtual Events

AV Everywhere

If this were a usual year, you might be hosting in-person events that connect with your customers, build relationships with new clients, and show your company’s value. For the time being, that may not be possible — but it doesn’t mean you have to lose that source of connection.

You may have noticed the rise in virtual events as a safe alternative to on-site conferences, trade shows and field events. Those virtual events are where you provide thought leadership and promote your offerings to your guests.

VideoLink delivers the video services that empower you to delight your audience at a time that requires social distancing. The VideoLink team does it all from pre- to post-production: adapting live events for virtual presentation, putting together a compelling story, and hosting a well-produced event that reflects well on your company.

Next week, VideoLink’s Stu Siegal, their creative director, will be sharing two posts to help you plan and fund your virtual events:

  • Top Five Virtual Event Strategies for Success – Stick the landing at your next virtual event with our top five strategies for success.
  • How to Sign Sponsorships for Virtual Events – Sign more sponsors for your next virtual event by following this eight-step plan.

In the meantime, bookmark the VideoLink blog site, where you’ll find helpful resources that explain ways to create an outstanding live video production that impresses your audience. Town halls, webcasts, on-location events: the VideoLink team covers these and other topics that will help you understand the power of video to increase brand awareness, recruit students or employees, and share updates within your organization.

To view our Partner blog, click here

Updating Your Digital Workplace for the New Normal

AV Everywhere

During this time of remote work, many companies have continued their business operations by  giving their employees the technology tools that keep them collaborating. 

As we gradually get back to business as usual, what we call “as usual” may have changed as well. The last few months have shut down businesses or hindered their efforts to keep up their operations. Even if your organization was one of those that was already on board with collaboration technology, you’ve seen firsthand just how much people rely on each other when they can’t be in the same office, where they’re just a few feet away from asking a question, giving an answer, or providing an update. 

Our post-COVID-19 era, if we may optimistically call it that, is one that will find thousands of organizations wanting to improve their collaboration environment for those working on-site and off. The following factors will impact and shape the new normal in the workplace: 

Well-being: The offices you return to won’t be like the offices you left before the shutdown. Here are some ways you’ll maintain social connections while also providing for your employees’ well-being through recommended best practices and guidelines they must follow:

  • Support monitored social distancing throughout the workplace, including collaboration spaces. A conference room that was designed to hold 10 people might now only have chairs for five participants at a time. 
  • Share safety protocols like frequent hand washing, social distancing, contact tracing, and the frequent cleaning of common devices and furniture. 
  • Create new spaces and redevelop existing ones to include touchless control and BYOD (bring your own device) capabilities.

Video collaboration: For people to work from home and on site, they need reliable, simple-to-use collaboration technology that integrates with their company’s network and applications. Having that high-quality, user-friendly technology also improves the experience for those connecting with them from various locations. Here are some areas to consider as you address a digital workplace equipped with video collaboration:

  • Look at the ways your staff has used collaboration spaces and how those use cases are expected to change. Prepare for more activity-based workspaces while keeping in mind they might not follow the design you had in mind before COVID-19. Even with enhanced cleaning measures in place, people may not want to use the touch-enabled devices that book rooms, start meetings, or engage video.
  • Provide a consistent user experience for those working from home. Standardize on a UCC solution that is easy to use and has the features that will accommodate your different user types.
  • Consider non-traditional spaces like manufacturing floors as candidates for video collaboration.

Security: The expansion of the work environment to off-site locations, including the home, means that cybersecurity must also expand to include remote workers on a much larger scale than you may have previously anticipated. However, on-site work continues to be a mainstay of company operations. As your business transitions back to the offices, you’ll need to help your talent interact with on-site technology in a way that keeps information secure.

Consider these areas as your IT team focuses on your company’s information security:

  • As you add UCC solutions for in-room and remote collaboration, review the cybersecurity features of those providers. Understand the built-in permissions and privacy protocols of their solutions so you know what steps to take to keep your information secure.
  • Prepare for a resurgence of BYOD. Expect your staff to prefer using their own devices to interact with and control collaboration room technology.
  • As you give access to company services to remote workers, consider how that access affects the security of those on-premise or cloud-based services.
  • Address the home LAN with cybersecurity measures that protect company information, including documents and chat files.

Automation: In the workplace, many employees are booking common rooms and using a variety of control and collaboration devices that are also being used by their colleagues.

By automating in-office functions like scheduling and room control, you can improve the collaboration experience while also minimizing health risks by reducing the number of touch points. Some ideas for incorporating automation technology in your workplace include:

  • Deploy virtual digital assistants like Alexa for Business to create a touch-free experience in collaboration spaces. Through voice activation, people can start their meetings and the devices that allow them to connect with remote colleagues, share documents from their personal devices, and wirelessly connect their devices to room displays.
  • Offer personalized wayfinding employees and visitors through a combination of mobile apps and digital signage. This minimizes foot traffic by efficiently guiding people to their destinations.
  • Automate workspace assignments so that employees know when and where they are scheduled to be on site. These assignments can be based on each person’s need to use on-site resources as well as their work preferences.
  • Use remote concierge services to schedule, launch meetings, and monitor meetings. User management applications like AVI-SPL Symphony can do this, as well as remotely monitor and manage rooms, devices, the network, and the conference infrastructure.

Intelligent buildings: Intelligent building technology anticipates and responds to the way people work, and it streamlines their interactions with spaces and the kind of technology they need to use. These systems give insight into how spaces are being used so that a company can use the analytics to decide if it needs to reconfigure spaces and/or build new ones.

  • Design responsive environments driven by AI and ambient computing. These rooms anticipate what devices and applications will be needed based on who schedules them, who is using the room, and the meeting purpose. Facial recognition tells system how you like the temperature and lighting in a room, and the preferred way of starting a meeting.
  • The Internet of Things (IoT) and occupancy sensors, thermal cameras, and Wi-Fi tracking show the density of people gathered in various areas throughout the workplace. They provide alerts when they anticipate collaboration sessions will go over the approved number of participants. That information can be used to provide intelligent space scheduling that shows available rooms for supporting the required number of in-person participants while also maintaining social distancing.
  • Integrated workplace management systems do the heavy lifting by monitoring spaces, down to the device level. This ensures that only rooms with functioning technology are available to schedule, and it lets the support team know when an issue needs a resolution. These systems help staff resolve these issues before an end user experiences any difficulty during a meeting. 

AVI-SPL is helping organizations like yours determine what your “new normal” work experience will look like as you  collaborate across offices and remote locations. If you have any questions about the issues shared in this post, or would like to discuss your organization’s collaboration strategy, contact us.

To view our Partner blog, click here

Evaluate Your Disaster Collaboration Plan

AV Everywhere

COVID-19 has highlighted that many of us were ill-prepared for a prolonged global disaster.  Better accustomed to hurricanes, tornadoes, and other natural disasters, we had (fortunately) never experienced a crisis like this in our lifetimes. Now that we have had to learn these lessons the hard way, how can we use this knowledge and experience to ensure we are better prepared in the future?

We can all agree that business continuity is the most important aspect in any crisis.  As the world begins to return to “normal”, we should take advantage of this opportunity to evaluate how we have managed the current challenge and think about how we can better prepare ourselves for the next crisis.

When evaluating how well your systems functioned during the crisis, here are a few questions with which to begin:

With many cloud services’ free offers expiring shortly, are you prepared to pay the bill for continued service?  Will this service improve your disaster response in the future, or can alternatives meet this need?

Now is the time to evaluate your options and anticipate how these will assist you in maintaining business continuity in a second wave of lockdowns, or a more traditional disaster.

While most applications have seen a spike in utilization, are there any applications with suspiciously low usage?

This may be pointing out your workforce has developed their own solutions or workarounds for your systems, causing security and intellectual property concerns.

Who are your most crucial users?  Who should belong to Phase 2 or 3?

Rolling out emergency procedures can be time consuming, and you should prioritize when possible to ensure your business continues to be as capable as possible during interruption. While executives are a natural answer, your front-line client support should not be overlooked. New product development, marketing, and even accounting should be considered for lower priority in your disaster collaboration plan.

Are your offices ready to handle users who have increased their adoption of video services?

Social distancing requirements may require a sustained uptick in video meeting adoption as some team members are in the office while others are at home.  Additionally, some employees may be uncomfortable being in an enclosed space with others.  Evaluate your office to include any conference rooms or huddle spaces that could be equipped with video to keep up with increased demand. It is becoming much cheaper to outfit rooms with basic video conferencing and content sharing technology.  Defined corporate standards should provide easy templates to quickly outfit these spaces.

When evaluating your current response and working to refine future plans, there are a few other areas to consider that also impact business continuity:

 

Redundancy and Resilience

Luckily, the world has been moving to many cloud-based platforms in the past few years: between file storage and sharing, cloud video, and shared productivity apps, we are already in a much better place than we would have been even 10 years ago.  However, there are strings attached to that cloud: licensing, security, and the ability for end user devices to access these technologies are all limiting factors. Some areas to ensure you have covered:

  • Securing video meetings against intruders, with a passcode or other method
  • Your device must be secure – but it must also connect to a secure platform. Are the management platforms, manufacturer portals, and individual device logins secure against attack? (For a more in-depth look, listen to our recent webinar with Crestron on AV and cybersecurity.)

 

Enabling Working from Anywhere

In the past, we have joked about working from our backyard hammock, the beach, or a boat.  For these uncommon occurrences, the low-res webcam built into laptops, or those headphones you got with your phone, are perfectly adequate. The recent scramble to acquire webcams, headsets, and other remote work enablement devices has proven the need for quality hardware.  Luckily, these items will not just sit in dusty boxes – they can be utilized in-office as well, improving the user experience and promoting the adoption of video meetings.

Consider purchasing employees basic hardware, such as those provided in AVI-SPL’s work from home bundles, as a hedge against potential second-wave quarantines and future disasters.  AVI-SPL has expanded its offerings to provide solutions specific to COVID-19 office space needs:

  • Temperature checks with the Aurora Temperature Check Tablet
  • Touchless hand sanitizer stations such as the Liberty Cable NOVI-AHS
  • Additional wireless demand will require a more durable network. Consider adding more WAP’s like the Luxul WS-80
  • Improve the videoconferencing experience with webcams, such as the Logitech C925E and audio solutions such as the Yamaha YVC-330
  • Wireless content sharing to enable social distancing while working in a group, using tools like the Barco ClickShare

 

Manage It Remotely

Are there elements of your collaboration technology environment that you cannot manage remotely? How will you handle a situation where a fire, tornado, or other natural disaster compromises your server or office access?  While we have been relatively lucky lately that we can access our offices when required, this will not always be the case.

If you work in a corporate HQ that oversees and supports a company-wide technology environment, how will your satellite offices cope if HQ is gone? 

Is your company planning on equipping multiple smaller offices, rather than one large office, to gain social distancing space?

Once again, a plan for redundancy and resiliency is needed.  Systems such as AVI-SPL Symphony will allow you to monitor and control remote office technologies while enabling remote troubleshooting and meeting monitoring.  This cloud-based application enables you to run a support desk from home and promotes social distancing: minimizing the number of on-site trips required and the number of staff required in-office. 

 

Utilize Your Trusted Advisor

One of the most important life skills – in AV, UCC, or any situation – is to know when we have reached the limits of our knowledge.  Even experts consult with other experts, and it is always a good practice to check in with others to get a second opinion.

AVI-SPL’s teams are at your convenience for that expert opinion. Beyond your account manager or service manager, AVI-SPL’s talented design teams can develop corporate standards that account for increased social distancing, remove touch elements from your conference rooms, and improve the reliability and scalability of your collaboration environment.  Let us know you need help, and we will provide the service and support you require.

To view our Partner blog, click here

How IT/AV Teams Can Answer Common Remote User Questions

AV Everywhere

Despite all the rapid changes our clients have made to the way they collaborate, and an over 50% increase in daily calls, AVI-SPL support teams have never wavered.  Standing strong (in their remote workstations) to assist end users as well as their usual AV-support department contacts, our support teams are ensuring everyone is capable of collaborating from wherever they are quarantining. 

I checked in with Michael Coleman, AVI-SPL national help desk manager, to see how his team is handling the challenges of being fully remote while teaching users to also be remote. Many of those users may not have routinely engaged video or collaboration technology. Michael gave me the rundown on how questions from users have changed and the best strategies for companies to ensure all their users are collaborating to their full potential. Common questions include:

  • “Which platform is best for video conferencing? I have Skype, and Cisco, and Teams on my computer – which do I use?”
  • “Which platform is best for webinars?”
  • “How do I get my audio to work?”
  • “How do I handle recordings?”
  • And Michael’s favorite – “How do I do that potato thing?”

It’s clear that end users are trying hard to collaborate, but there are some basic questions and guidelines for your IT and AV departments to address to ensure your users are well educated on video collaboration and your chosen flavor of product. This drives user satisfaction and ensures security of communications and corporate files. Let’s take a look again at those FAQ’s and provide some answers.

“What platform is best for video conferencing? I have Skype, and Cisco, and Teams on my computer – which do I use?

UCC/AV management teams can help users by providing a user guide or other clear messaging, such as:

  • Teams is our preferred collaboration platform. We use this application for chat, file sharing, and availability.
  • Pexip is our preferred video meeting application.

The major collaboration providers have made a suite of resources available for end-user training and adoption.  Place these in an easily accessible location so users can begin with self-help and education.  We have created a listing of these resources on our AVI-SPL website. It’s also a good idea to identify platforms that your users may be asked to join in meetings with other companies – and provide basic help documentation – so they can better understand the differences and your corporate preferences.

User experience has a huge impact on the adoption, satisfaction, and usage of collaboration and video conferencing applications.  On the management side, ensuring meetings can be scheduled with one click in Outlook (or your preferred email application) serves to greatly reduce confusion and improves the user experience.

 

“Which platform is best for webinars”

Your preferred collaboration platform may be your preferred solution for webinars, but if you have an alternate solution, be sure to have additional instructions available for this platform, including when it should be used. As dozens of in-person events have moved to digital formats, it’s important to ensure you have a webinar platform that allows in only who have permission, and that its information can’t be grabbed by those not invited. As for which is best — that’s a question with a number of relative answers. A variety of platforms offer different benefits, drawbacks, and cost structures.

 

“How do I get my audio to work?”

The most common problem we’ve seen recently is users who know how to get started but quickly run into frustrating issues that may cause them to revert back to a phone or other less feature-rich methods that reduce the ability to collaborate, not just work. While some users may not understand the need to dial in with their phone when their computer is connected to a meeting, many users are running into poor audio quality due to equipment that was not designed for daily use.

Ensure your end users are equipped with proper technology to achieve a quality collaboration experience. With the variety of distractions that can exist in the home office when spouses, children, and pets are together all day, the basic webcam and microphone included in a computer, or the headphones included with their cell phone, may not cut it for a full work day on a regular basis. AVI-SPL has a variety of work-from-home bundles that can solve this challenge.

 

“How do I handle recordings?”

The answer to this question depends on the underlying recording solution selected by your organization. Many times, a recording may seem to “disappear” after it is completed, making it a challenge for the recording employee to find the file. Or the file may be too large to share easily. Add instructions to your corporate UCC/AV user guide on how to use recording, when to use recording, and how to access files.

 

“How do I do that potato thing?” / “How do I use a virtual background”

Luckily, these questions are very easily addressed. Zoom offers a tutorial. And AVI-SPL published a video walkthrough for Microsoft Teams. Branded corporate images are a great idea for custom backgrounds. Consider building yours today!

If you have any questions about ways to improve support for your users, contact us now or call your local AVI-SPL office. 

To view our Partner blog, click here

5 Tips for Resolving Conflict During Remote Work

AV Everywhere

AVI-SPL wants to help your teams stay connected and productive during this difficult time as most of us are working, teaching, and learning from home. Our Together We Are series on working from home offers helpful ideas and resources. Read all Together We Are posts.

As companies and their staff adjust to remote work, one of the areas they have to focus on is remote management of employees, a topic we’ve covered in previous posts. Today, let’s look at ways managers can address evaluations, performance issues, and conflict when their direct reports are working remotely.

Even when the threat of COVID-19 is past us, millions of employees will continue to work from home, at least part time. That means they have to be managed remotely, which can pose a challenge for managers and those they supervise. Workplace conflicts still happen, even when we aren’t sharing an office. Supervisors must still monitor performance and productivity. Under a remote-work scenario, addressing those issues can appear as significant, even frustrating challenges.

Here are a few tips for successfully managing staff when you have to evaluate performance, address issues, and resolve conflicts among employees.

Communicate: Part of being a manager is letting your team members know what is expected of them. By being transparent, you’re establishing a foundation for required levels of behavior, cooperation, and performance among staff. Those expectations will be your reference points when it’s time to review employee performance, respond to feedback, or sort out conflicts among them.  We’ve said it before on this blog: You have to engage with your staff on a frequent, regular basis. Better to have too much communication than too little when you and others are working remotely. It’s easy to fall out of normal communication routines when you don’t see each other in meetings or common areas. By checking in every day or at least multiple times a week, managers let their staff know what is expected of them, where they’re doing well, and which areas need improvement.

On a related note: Being able to check in every day means you and your staff are available to each other. As we explained in this post for managing remote teams, require team members (including yourself) to keep their status icons updated so that others know when they are available to answer questions or have an on-demand chat.

Document the issues: When you communicate issues with an employee, let the call be a discussion where they understand the nature of your performance standard. Explain to them what the issues are, e.g. “You missed two meetings or a call with the customer.” Then you should set forth the improvements that you expect to see within a reasonable time frame. Be clear about your expectations and where they haven’t been met. Some positions will lend themselves to a clearly data-driven analysis: When supervising call center staff or service technicians, you likely have access to analytics for objective evaluation. Other positions are less visible in that aspect, but you’ll still need to reference defined standards.

Resolving conflicts among workers can be more challenging. If someone has a performance issue or a conflict with another employee, it’s ideal to handle those types of issues in person, where all parties are in the same room. However, that’s not always possible during remote work.  The following tips would apply during in-person gatherings and will help you be successful during video calls when dealing with sensitive personnel matters.

Set out ground rules in advance: Passions can run hot when it comes to workplace disagreements and conflicts. And it can be difficult to referee reactions and behavior over a video call. That’s why you need to establish some ground rules. This can be an email you send before the meeting or a quick one-on-one with each person involved in a dispute. Clarify the order in which the parties, including yourself, will speak and make their case.  Make clear that once someone has said explained their version of events, the other party or parties will be given the opportunity to deliver their side of the story.

Gather the facts first: Prior to having a group meeting about a workplace conflict, meet with each person over video and let them share their story in a private conversation. Then when you get to the joint discussion about it, you will have had time to investigate, get input from others, and understand what’s relevant to the discussion and what still needs to be determined.

See and hear everyone: Some social exchanges can get lost on a video call, and an in-person meeting may be preferable when it comes to resolving conflict. But even when these meetings are held over video, the visual cues are still there and the process is mostly the same as the in-person event. Even with those cues being visible, you want to verbalize more than you normally would so that attendees know they are being heard and understood.

One consistent piece of advice you may have heard when it comes to video conferencing: The video part matters less than the audio. Because without good audio, it doesn’t matter who or what you can see. However, because you want to see body language during an evaluation or conflict resolution so that you can anticipate someone’s need to talk — or you just want to see how they’re reacting — you need both aspects to be high quality.

To capture the in-person experience, take into consideration the number of people who are visible at the same time on a video conferencing system. Unified communications solutions like Microsoft Teams allow you to see and hear multiple people at once, so you’ll be nearly as comfortable and effective during those types of interactions as you would be in the same room. You’ll just need to limit your meeting to the number of people who can be seen at one time.

The challenges of remote work can be compounded when you have to deal with difficult and sometimes uncomfortable work-related situations. But these are the realities of the workplace, whether we’re sharing a physical office or connecting from our homes. I hope the tips above help you see that with a high-quality collaboration solution, and by following good practices, you can effectively deal with these challenges.

 

 

 

 

To view our Partner blog, click here