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How Small Collaboration Spaces Deliver Big Results at Work

AV in Meeting Spaces

Sometimes you just need a quick get-together to organize a plan of attack. At other times, you’ll want to gather a few people to work on a project. Or you may need to consult right now with colleagues who are at another location.

What solves the challenges in each of these scenarios? The value of having a small collaboration space where core members of a team can share ideas, work on documents in real time, and connect with colleagues and clients at remote locations. In “Small Spaces, Big Outcomes,” find out why small spaces like huddle rooms have become popular and will continue to be an essential part of the workplace. This guide also explores other benefits of small collaboration spaces, including:

  • Better use of your real estate (large meeting spaces are rarely used to capacity).
  • Attracting and keeping the employees that drive your business success.
  • Efficient use of technology. Equipping a series of small spaces with unified communications technology leads to better collaboration than experienced in large conference rooms.

Technology for Your Small Collaboration Spaces

This guide includes a look at specific Poly technology solutions and their benefits to your workplace collaboration efforts. You’ll get concise explanations of the benefits and features of:

  • Polycom Studio
  • Polycom + HP SRS Bundle
  • CCX Business Media Phones for Microsoft Teams
  • Polycom Trio

You’ll also learn about the advantages you can gain when integrating Polycom room solutions with Alexa for Business.

If you have any questions about what you’ve read, or you’d like to read more content that will help you make an informed decision about improving your workplace with collaboration and AV solutions, we’re here to help. Visit the  AVI-SPL Resources page for more content (you can narrow your results by focusing on technology type, the content format, and vendor partner). 

You can also connect with AVI-SPL via web form by going to the AVI-SPL contact page. Prefer talking to someone? Reach out to AVI-SPL at 866-708-5034.

Get your copy of “Small Spaces, Big Outcomes: Trade Office Spaces for Engaging Collaboration Environments”  >

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How to Design Huddle Rooms for Your Organization

AV Everywhere

Today’s workers want the ability to collaborate from any location, anytime. Impromptu meetings — whether face to face or via video conferencing — is the new normal for today’s workforce.

While there’s still a need for large meetings in formal conference rooms, many employees are choosing huddle spaces to collaborate and share ideas. Rising real estate costs are also motivating companies to provide spaces that can accommodate small groups of people and connect them with colleagues around the world.

When equipped with the right audio, video, conferencing, sharing, and scheduling capabilities, modern huddle spaces can significantly increase work efficiency and improve productivity. 

In the HARMAN Huddle Space Design Guide, you will learn about topics like:

  • Why dedicated meeting spaces are ideal for group collaboration
  • Rooms designed for inspiration and productivity
  • How to show everyone on a video call
  • Tools that improve the audio experience
  • One-click meeting start
  • Easy document access
  • Room scheduling

To learn more about how you can create inspiring huddle spaces that people will want to use, complete the form in the link below to download the design guide.

Download the HARMAN Huddle Space Design Guide >

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Show Us Your Collaborative Work Space on National Selfie Day

AV Everywhere

Friday, June 21, is National Selfie Day. Which probably means it’s a day like any other for people who love (or live) to share on social media. But whether you’re a novice at the self portrait or a seasoned expert, we have a special request.

AVI-SPL is taking part in this unofficial holiday by asking its clients, offices, and LinkedIn and Twitter followers to share their favorite collaborative work spaces and tag them #NationalSelfieDay. To give you some guidance on what we’re looking for, AVI-SPL’s Marketing team has shared its enthusiastic contribution.

As we receive photos, I’ll upload them into a gallery in this post, so check back over the next few days for more images — and possibly some inspiration for your organization. 

AVI-SPL specializes in being a digital services provider to organizations around the world — which means we provide them with the collaboration technology that helps team members share knowledge, brainstorm, and drive better business outcomes. We work with our customers to define what collaboration looks like to their organization. And over the next few days, we hope to see examples of where that collaboration takes place for you.

Share your images to our Twitter or LinkedIn accounts. 

AVI-SPL Canada selfie
AVI-SPL Marketing Team

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The Four S’s Are Your Keys to Collaboration Success

AV Everywhere

You want your workplace to be more than a building where people are obliged to meet for at least eight hours a day. It should be a home where teams can share and build upon ideas that help your company grow. To create the spaces that inspire your workers, AVI-SPL follows the “four S’s”: simple, standardized, scalable and serviceable. Each of these guidelines work together to form the workspaces that help meet your organization’s desired outcomes. Below, we look at what each of these principles means, why they matter, and how they work together.

Simple, Standardized, Scalable, and Serviceable

Simple — Are you going to use a conference room where the technology is an obstacle course of complexity, unreliability, and frustration? If you’re inclined to use a collaboration space, you want to work with colleagues on a project, not wonder why you can’t get the interactive display to sync to your device.

To apply simplicity to a space doesn’t mean you’ve limited its capabilities. Rather, you’ve removed the complex barriers to using and benefiting from those capabilities. This is usually the meaning when you hear someone describe a technology system as “frictionless.” Starting a meeting is streamlined, so that you can quickly start the display, audio, video, presentation, and get the purpose of the meeting underway.

Standardized — Regardless of where you’re working from, the technology experience needs to be the same among similar rooms in all locations. An employee that knows how to use a collaboration room in his or her home office should be able to do the same in another regional office. Applying standards and best practices makes the experience simple for the end user. Some of our clients have room standards that AVI-SPL must deliver reliably and in a way that allows their organizations to grow.

If you’ve yet to settle upon standards, AVI-SPL can help develop and provide them through its Rapid Rooms and Smart Spaces. These are collaboration spaces of various types that have been preconfigured with essential collaboration tools for various group sizes.

Your regional requirements may mean substituting one solution for another based on product availability. AVI-SPL lets customers know how their budgets may fluctuate based on those regional preferences. Because we are aware of differences within the same company, our designers, programmers and integrators ensure that your room functionality is consistent across locations.

Scalable — A scalable set of solutions are easily repeatable from office to office. By keeping room solutions simple and standardized, we can quickly deploy your rooms so that your regional locations stay connected. As your company grows and adds more collaboration spaces and solutions, so does AVI-SPL’s support of those solutions and your user experience through our managed services.

Serviceable — AVI-SPL considers serviceability as a design element when developing standards for your rooms and technology systems. That’s because spaces that are easy to use should also be easy to support. We assess the network topology where the solutions are being deployed so that the IT stakeholders can deliver and support the solutions on a consistent basis.

Serviceability means IT and/or  your managed services provider can proactively resolve issues and acquire the analytics that provide business insights, like how often your collaboration spaces are being used, the quality of the experience, and the number of service tickets that were generated in a particular time frame. From the data analysis of those standardized rooms, your organization continues to adjust its standards and conference rooms, and improve the user experience.

We find that customers are demanding actionable business intelligence about their collaboration solutions. They want to know if their technology systems are delivering ROI by improving productivity and if they need to reconfigure their collaboration spaces. AVI-SPL’s Symphony managed services platform provides the analytics to let you know whether your systems are delivering their intended value.

Work With the Experts in the Collaborative Workplace Experience

By following the four S’s, AVI-SPL creates meaningful spaces and better workplace experiences. Contact AVI-SPL and let us know where we can help improve the business outcomes for your organization.  

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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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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” >

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