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Q&A on Flexible Workplaces and the Future of Work

AV Events

 In the following Q&A with workplace solutions experts Dusty Duistermars, you’ll learn about changes in the workplace: what’s driving those changes and how companies can adapt. Dusty Duistermars is the senior vice president of digital solutions for JLL, which specializes in professional services in real estate.

Interview With Dusty Duistermars

Q: What is the flexible workplace and what makes it so attractive?
Duistermars: Technology — specifically, mobility — has been impacting where and how we work for over two decades. The flexible workplace is simply space that allows employees to work in non-traditional ways, including remote work, co-working and desk sharing/hoteling. Flex space is typically higher-tech enabled, allowing employees to reserve space based on the type of activity they’re performing and only for a limited duration. These activity-based working spaces include a variety of supportive technologies like interactive video conferencing and wireless sharing of content that can be annotated in real time by participants.

We can trace this to a couple of factors: millennials and technology. Millennials have grown up with the technology that allows them to be in touch with one another on a 24/7 basis. So it’s no surprise that they expect the same of their work environment.

Q: Are we at a point where people can say “no thanks” to a company that doesn’t offer them the experience and resources they need?
Duistermars: Absolutely. Due to the overall talent shortages, employees have options. They could also go freelance; we’ll see the gig economy double in the next five years. If employers are not leveraging their space as a differentiator to both retain and attract employees, they will ultimately fail.

Q: What does this shift look like from the company side?
Duistermars: It’s no longer about occupancy, it’s about utilization and productivity.

Q: So instead of permanent assignments to space, assignments to real-time usage?
Duistermars: Right. You might have 200 or more people assigned to a designated area (typically referred to as a ‘neighborhood’) that only has 100 desks, and that will work because they’re not there at the same time.

Q: To do this, don’t you need a culture that welcomes and supports people working in and out of the office?
Duistermars: Yes, and you can build that culture by making collaboration technology systems and spaces available to them. Focus groups, design partners, and IT will help figure out how flexible to go in those areas. They’ll also account for work types, as on-site engineers will require different types of space than say the national sales team who’s rarely at ‘their’ desk. The idea is that more personalization and flexibility add to the employee experience.

Q: Where are companies at with the move to flexible workplaces?
Duistermars: First off, this doesn’t happen overnight. There are multiple steps, including detailed change management and communication strategies that are needed to be successful. That being said, we see, on average, about 5-10% of client portfolios being flexible. It’ll grow to roughly 30% within the next five years.

Q: What will account for that increase?
Duistermars: Talent is driving a lot of this. Millennials want the flexibility. It also a much better cost model for employers. A dedicated space can cost employers on average, $10,000 annually. That’s a lot of money for someone who’s only in their seat about half the time. Thus, desk sharing makes business sense too.

Q: Let’s shift perspective to the IT side. As more spaces become flexible, how does that affect their management?
Duistermars: It makes managing those spaces a challenge if you don’t have the right tools in place. Some platforms are capable of managing numerous aspects of the ecosystem. Or if you’re using a point solution/best in class model, you’ll want to make certain that it’s integrated properly and that you’re getting the right data (typically utilization) out of each system and able to analyze holistically.

Q: How is JLL helping companies that need employees on site?
Duistermars: That’s a great question. Allow me to break this down: First, we involve our consulting and labor analytics group to make certain the company is choosing the right markets/locations based on the type of talent that they need.

From there, we help them create great spaces where employees want to be. We also lean on partners like AVI-SPL to make sure the experience from desk to meeting spaces is frictionless.

Q: What advice do you have for companies that haven’t yet bought into the idea of workplace transformation?
Duistermars: The only constant is change. If you’re not getting ahead of this by focusing on your people and your technology, you won’t need to worry about any of this in five years; your company won’t exist.

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How to Build Huddle Rooms That Increase Employee Engagement

AV in Meeting Spaces

Employee engagement is a crucial success factor for staff retention and company profitability. Gallup reports that “companies with highly engaged workforces outperform their peers by 147 percent in earnings per share.” Meanwhile, “87 percent of employees worldwide are not engaged.” What does this mean for you?

The challenge is on to create workplaces like huddle rooms that inspire collaboration and employee engagement.

How do you deliver a digital workplace where on-site and remote coworkers can easily connect and share ideas? Offer plenty of video-enabled huddle spaces for small, impromptu working sessions. Need inspiration? Follow this roadmap to build huddle rooms that increase employee engagement.

Create your huddle room success team

Start by creating a huddle room success team. Include stakeholders who support or will benefit from attracting and retaining top talent through employee engagement. Consider the desired huddle room user experience or UX, before you build or upgrade collaboration spaces.

  • It’s essential that the group represents the departments that hold the project’s purse strings too.
  • Consider huddle room build, design, video conferencing systems, support, and software budgets.
  • The team may consist of C-Suite members, end users, human resources managers, workplace strategists, IT staff, and facilities managers.

Define employee engagement benchmarks and goals

Next, define what successful engagement looks like by identifying benchmarks and setting goals. Example benchmarks include average employee tenure and current conference room utilization and the number of video meetings booked each month. 

Third-party focus groups and one-on-one interviews can also help you define current engagement levels and collaborative workspace preferences. Now set goals based on how much you want to improve these metrics each quarter, or annually after you’ve installed your huddle rooms. 

Develop a huddle room video adoption plan

Beautiful huddle rooms outfitted with the latest digital workplace solutions won’t necessarily increase employee engagement if your small collaboration spaces sit empty. Before the team starts construction, write a video adoption plan to encourage huddle room utilization.

  • The adoption plan should include employee training and a way to measure room and technology use.
  • Staff must know how to reserve huddle rooms and use new video conferencing and collaboration tools.
  • It’s also helpful to identify an influencer at every level from executives to end-users to champion video adoption and encourage employee engagement.

Design a user-friendly huddle room

Ever have to wait 10 minutes for a video conference to start? To encourage video adoption and engagement, ensure that huddle room equipment is easy to use. Include equipment and software staff members prefer, and that IT can easily support. Refer to your research to review which collaboration tools staff members like to use.

You can track current conference room usage via existing support software, or your scheduling system such as an Outlook calendar. Look at which rooms employees reserve most often. Study what type of video conference equipment is in your small meeting rooms.

Also, track how many employees were in the room and the number of remote employees that logged in to each meeting. Use this information to determine how many huddle rooms you need, and the room sizes that work best for your teams. Consider how to support bring your own device (BYOD) preferences when designing your digital workplace.

Use Room Standards to Create a Replicable, Positive User Experience

Based on your research and goals, develop huddle room equipment and software standards. Your standards are a finite set of hardware and software options. Most importantly, stick to these guidelines when building new collaboration spaces.

With standardization, employees will be familiar with meeting room controls. End users can walk into any huddle room and start the meeting quickly and easily. Remember that meeting that took too long to start? Standards help eliminate wasted meeting time. Limiting available options can streamline the IT support process also.

Positive user and IT staff experiences can lead to increased video conferencing adoption and employee engagement. Ask for staff suggestions on how to make meeting room control more user-friendly too. Allow users to provide feedback anytime through apps or email.

Consider Huddle Room-Specific Devices and Software

The popularity of huddle rooms has sparked suppliers to create hardware and software specifically for use in huddle rooms. When outlining your room standards, consider these collaboration solutions designed specifically for small meeting spaces. Huddle room gear can be more affordable than hardware designed for larger areas. Streamlined collaboration solutions can also be installed faster than more complex systems.

Cisco Webex® Room Kit Mini

Cisco’s Webex Room Kit Mini huddle room solution is easy to install and use. It’s a single device includes the codec, speakers, microphone, and camera.  This Cisco hardware is ideal for teams of two to five people. It allows users to connect to laptop-based video conferencing solutions via a USB connection.

Barco Clickshare CS-100 Huddle

Barco’s Clickshare CS-100 Huddle wireless presentation system helps small teams collaborate with fast and easy screen sharing. Users can share content from any laptop, tablet or smartphone using the Clickshare app or button.

Monitor huddle room devices and track room utilization

Tracking the goals your team set at the start of your project is essential to measuring room utilization and employee engagement. AVI-SPL’s Symphony user experience application makes it easy to monitor global room and device usage on a single screen, from anywhere.

Symphony proactively monitors conference room equipment. Your staff can address issues before they negatively impact huddle room user experiences and employee engagement. If your IT resources are already strained, consider a managed services solution as well.

Keep in contact with end users and IT support

While you deserve to celebrate your huddle room success, don’t disband your team once your small conference rooms are in use. Review end-user feedback to find ways to improve the meeting room experience and increase room utilization rates.

With your huddle room utilization rates in hand, measure them against changes in staff turnover. Look for correlations between employee engagement via collaboration in huddle rooms, and longer employee tenure. Update your room standards as needed.

Get more huddle room planning ideas

Ready to get started? Check out the How to Create Inspiring, Collaborative Huddle Rooms guide for further details on how to build small collaboration spaces that increase employee engagement. Read ideas on how to determine the number of huddle rooms you’ll need and how to estimate costs. Download the huddle room guide now.

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Webinar Recording: Why You Need AV over IP in the Workplace

AV Everywhere

The recording for our webinar on the value of AV over IP in the workplace is a must-watch if you’ve been looking for the latest advance in distributing your audio and video content over the network.

AV has traditionally been designed around having a matrix switch in the middle that you tie your AV devices into. Today, a host of applications are possible with AV over IP, making for a better meeting experience and helping IT manage signal distribution. 

In this webinar, presented by Crestron’s Dan Jackson, and hosted by AVI-SPL, Commercial Integrator, and My TechDecisions, you’ll understand why AV over IP is the right choice for your organization and how you can use your current devices and infrastructure to make it work. Dan and Josh Vallon, an expert programmer with AVI-SPL, also address issues like security, image quality, bandwidth costs and more, including:

  • Crestron solutions including NVX Network AV Digital Media and XiO Cloud
  • How to evaluate your current streaming video quality and infrastructure
  • Top network security considerations

Get the recording for “Why You Need AV over IP in the Workplace” >

To view our Partner blog, click here

TechBoost Events Reveal Future of Work in Canada

AV Events

Throughout 2019, AVI-SPL Canada is hosting its TechBoost series of networking events that give you access to digital workplace experts and technology providers that improve team productivity and reduce your real estate costs.

At venues across Canada, you’ll learn about the meeting solutions, video collaboration, and enterprise video capabilities that attract and retain talent.

You’ll understand how to apply technology strategies and solutions that increase business agility and results. You’ll also learn how AVI-SPL managed services ensure they measure up to your objectives. We’ve got our complete slate of events scheduled and ready for your registration.

TechBoost Cities in 2019

Join AVI-SPL and select partners as we spend an afternoon exploring the technology and unified communication trends that are facilitating groundbreaking changes to the workplace. Lunch will be served at each event.

Click the links above to register for the TechBoost event you’d like to attend.

Tout au long de 2019, AVI-SPL Canada est l’hôte d’une série d’événements de réseautage sous le nom de Pause-Techno, qui vous donnent accès à des experts en environnement de travail numérique et à des fournisseurs de technologie qui améliorent la productivité des équipes et réduisent les coûts immobiliers.

Partout au Canada, vous découvrirez les solutions de réunion, la collaboration vidéo et les systèmes de diffusion vidéo d’entreprise qui attirent et retiennent les talents.

Vous comprendrez comment appliquer des stratégies et des solutions technologiques qui augmentent l’agilité et les résultats de l’entreprise. Vous apprendrez également comment les services gérés d’AVI-SPL s’assurent qu’ils répondent à vos objectifs. Nous avons notre liste complète d’événements prévus et prêts pour votre inscription.

Pause Techno- Villes en 2019

Rejoignez AVI-SPL, et sélectionnez des partenaires, pendant que nous passons un après-midi à explorer les tendances technologiques et de communication unifiée qui facilitent les changements révolutionnaires dans le monde du travail. Le déjeuner sera servi à chaque événement.

Cliquez sur les liens ci-dessus pour vous inscrire à l’événement TechBoost auquel vous souhaitez participer.

To view our Partner blog, click here

Four Reasons Your Workplace Needs Huddle Rooms

AV Everywhere

With huddle rooms in the workplace, you can promote productivity and teamwork in your organization.  A new AVI-SPL paper looks at issues to consider so that you have huddle rooms that people want to use.

As you work with a partner like AVI-SPL to design, create and deploy your huddle rooms, you can start to gain the support of your stakeholders by making the case that having these flexible collaboration spaces will increase productivity by making it easier to people to work together on demand. Let’s briefly consider what the huddle room is, and then we’ll continue with why it’s important to organizations that want to be part of the future of work.

What Is a Huddle Room?

Think of the huddle room (or huddle space), as an area where people gather to do more than meet; they want to get work done. A huddle room has collaboration technology that allows a group of about 2-5 to gather around a small workstation and work together on content that can share from their personal devices. Technology systems usually include:

These assets make the huddle room much more than a small meeting space. It’s an area equipped for collaborative activities where people can work productively with one another.

Why Your Workplace Needs Huddle Rooms

  1. Collaborate right now.  Maybe your team is about to make a presentation or deliver a training session. You might have just left a meeting and a few members from that group need to work out their deliverables. Or you have colleagues at a remote location who need to share ideas. The huddle room is an ideal spot for team members to get together before an event, review and edit content, and share get the input of team members who’ve connected by video.
  2. People need a space for brainstorming. Doesn’t it seem like the meeting after the meeting is where the real productivity happens? Smaller working groups can use huddle rooms to assess their tasks, consider different plans of attack, and start to offer ideas to the group for further refinement. Connect by video to customers, clients, and colleagues, and your huddle room is a hub of productivity.
  3. Collaborative sessions are more frequent than meetings. Meetings are about sharing updates and assigning tasks. But as mentioned above, the huddle room is where the real work gets done. You’ll have more huddle rooms than conference rooms or training areas, and that’s OK because they take up less space than either.
  4. It’s better together. Your coworkers can complete their assignments faster when the work in teams. Tasks in a project may be dependent on one another, so collaborating face to face can help sort out what others need and expect.

Now that you know why the huddle room is a valuable asset, take a look at our guide to creating huddle rooms that people will use and deliver the benefits you expect.  You’ll learn:

  • How much huddle rooms cost
  • Figuring out how many huddle rooms you need
  • Examples of companies that are using huddle rooms

Get your copy of “How to Create Inspiring, Collaborative Huddle Rooms” >

To view our Partner blog, click here

Poly’s “Power of Many” Message for Businesses

Alexa for Business

Poly made noise in the AV and workplace collaboration industry this week as it became the new face of the combination of Plantronics and Polycom.

The company is supporting its first marketing campaign, “The Power of Many,” with some high-profile announcements that focus on product integration with technology from Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. Poly made these announcements while at Enterprise Connect in Orlando.

In the days that followed the rebranding as Poly, the company announced:

The Power of Many

Common to these products is their emphasis on bringing people together, which is the message of Poly’s “Power of Many” campaign. The “power of many” also describes the functions that are brought together in a solution. Systems that combine useful functions are what you might envision when you hear the term “unified communications” — the ability to review one’s calendar, join a meeting, and make video calls from one device.

Along with this versatility, the goal is simplicity, which is key to the user experience of solutions that combine multiple functions. You could say that’s the main appeal of a solution that includes Alexa, making it possible to manage meetings and room devices through voice.

Poly’s solution announcements this week indicate their focus on a positive user experience. Common to each of them:  These solutions integrate with systems that people are comfortable with and want to keep using in a way that isn’t needlessly complex. One phrase on the Poly website touts the ability to “concentrate on ideas in the air, not devices in the room.” When people use workplace collaboration solutions, they shouldn’t notice the technology to an extent that is disruptive. Rather, they should be able to give their attention to the collaboration that the technology is making possible.

As new solutions enable us to do more from more places, companies are wise to incorporate those solutions in the workplace to attract talented people who want to be able to collaborate in a variety of ways and do it on demand.

The solutions that are easiest to use will be the most attractive, as long as they have the capabilities that people expect. Those capabilities are with us in a variety of solution packages. The power of Poly’s message is in its focus on how its solutions make it easier for people to produce the products, ideas, services and innovations that keeps their businesses growing.

To view our Partner blog, click here