Newline’s Tyler Rittenhouse shares how to keep an audience engaged before, during, and after meetings using flexible technology like interactive displays.
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While businesses are reopening amid the post-COVID-19 reality, keeping staff, visitors, and customers safe in offices and collaboration spaces is essential. Experience environment and briefing center managers face an additional challenge — how to support social distancing and safety in areas designed to encourage people to explore, touch, and interact with exhibits and demos.
Briefing center managers must protect the well-being of visitors and employees while still providing a compelling user experience. Explore these six ways to promote health and safety in your customer experience centers.
You can show your commitment to safety and put visitors at ease as soon as they arrive in your experience center by adding layers of precautions.
Once a guest completes your welcome process, deliver wayfinding instructions to a mobile device or via digital signage. Recorded audio tours must be delivered via mobile app as well. Eliminate the use of paper maps and schedules, and headphones, and other shared devices.
For 3D or other exhibits that require gear such as glasses or visors, consider single-use disposable options. Alternatively, use equipment once daily to allow for deep cleaning during off-hours.
Social distancing may be a prolonged or permanent way of life in experience environments. Automate staff schedules to limit how many people will work each shift. This will help ensure your employees can comply with social distancing requirements. Communicate guidelines to all employees and identify which managers will monitor compliance among employees and visitors.
If your center hasn’t fully adopted IoT applications, now is the time to put this technology to work for you. Automated tasks that promote health and safety among staff and guests include:
Keeping public spaces “clean” has taken on new meaning amid COVID-19. Clean and sanitize your shared technology devices, demonstration areas, communal areas, and restrooms before you open your doors and several times each day. Pay extra attention to touch screens, and other devices visitors handle multiple times a day. You may need to alter your business hours to allow ample time for deep cleaning as needed.
Maintain an open dialog with your teams to answer questions and listen to feedback and ideas. They are your eyes and ears on the floor and can identify potential problems or confirm that your new guidelines are working as expected. Offering anonymous employee surveys online can encourage open responses from your team.
Consider if you can offer meaningful experiences to visitors in the comfort of their homes to keep staff and visitors safe. Ways to deliver virtual events include:
If you need assistance getting your experience environments and briefing centers ready to promote health and safety for employees and guests, the AVI-SPL team is here to help. We can also produce your virtual tours and conferences. Contact us online now or call your local office.
Today, nearly five million people in the U.S. are working remotely. Well before the coronavirus disrupted work as we know it, we were being told that remote work was an essential part of doing our jobs and that remote workers would dominate the workforce. The proliferation of remote work articles popping up in the wake of COVID-19 have made this an even more salient feature of our work lives. Millions of people around the world have had to adjust to a new way of working — a way that requires them to be at home but perform as if they were in the office.
One of the tools getting high-profile coverage is Microsoft Teams. Whether I’m in the office or working from home, I use Teams many times a day. It’s how colleagues chat me up with ideas and suggestions. It’s how I share editable documents that a specific work group can view and edit. It’s where I can scroll through a conversation to refresh my memory about where we left off a certain project or deliverable. And it’s where I attend video meetings with colleagues to brainstorm, share ideas, and get work done in real time. Let’s look in greater detail at how Microsoft Teams helps me — and can help you — work from home and anywhere else.
For the past couple of weeks, Microsoft Teams has taken on more prominence and importance as my colleagues and I work outside the office. Working remotely doesn’t have much meaning or benefit unless we’re being productive. And Microsoft Teams is supporting that productivity. Since so much of the work we produce is the result of collaboration, it’s easy to see why Microsoft calls Teams its “hub for teamwork.” You could click a link and see the kind of features and capabilities it offers. But for me — I hope for you as well — the best way to share what Microsoft Teams can do is to speak from experience.
Like you, I work on a lot of projects that involve collaboration with a wide range of colleagues. Within Microsoft Teams, I can create (or be added to) a group that is named for a particular project. For example, we formed one project to gather content for our forthcoming podcast. Within these dedicated virtual spaces, we can add files that anyone can edit and download. We also added a section for conversation topics. To those topics we can attach our names and notes so that we know who has responsibility for recruiting guests and scheduling their appearances. It’s a great way for me to remind myself what I’ve done, still have to do, and my deadline.
Another great reminder is the Posts tab, which includes the typed chats we’ve had about a topic. I frequently reference these conversations if I need to refresh my memory about what was discussed so that I know to work on a task or follow up with someone about theirs. This persistent chat is visual proof of our brainstorming, questions we’ve asked and answered, and announcements we’ve made to each other.
And speaking of visuals: It’s easy to jump into a video call with anyone in my contact list, which includes everyone in the company and anyone that I add. Once in a call, I’m two clicks away from recording the session, an essential tool when I’m interviewing a partner for one of AVI-SPL’s white papers. For most of these meetings, at least one attendee needs to share their content in the Teams window for all to see and understand. Another great feature: how easy it is schedule a Teams meeting from Outlook. I can schedule meetings from within the Microsoft Teams window, but I’m a creature of habit and I’m used to using the Outlook calendar. Whichever way you prefer, know that Teams accommodates your work style.
It’s worth noting that I’ve used only a fraction of Microsoft Teams’ capabilities. There’s plenty of apps that you may find helpful to support your work style or needs, including Stream, Wiki, OneNote, and a host of other built-in Office 365 applications.
I know I’ve given only a taste of what Microsoft Teams can do. Talk to one of AVI-SPL’s experts and you can ask about a host of other features like third-party solutions, the ability to integrate workflows, and the Teams developer platform that works with your business apps. If you choose, we can also take a deep dive with you into important benefits like security, manageability, and compliance, along with the room devices from our manufacturer partners that bring Microsoft Teams into the meeting space. With all I’ve shared, I’d be remiss to not include this overview of its key features:
There’s much more to cover, but here’s the takeaway that I hope resonates with you: whatever industry you’re in, Microsoft Teams can improve your operations and processes when it comes to work and collaboration.
As we get back into the flow of on-site meetings and collaboration sessions, we’ll want to be in the same conference rooms and huddle spaces to connect with people who are in those areas or working from other locations. I don’t have the personal experience with Surface Hub 2S that I have with Microsoft Teams, but I’ve seen the demos — enough to know that it’s the kind of tool that you want in your office when it’s time for groups in and out of the workplace to get together on a shared, high-resolution canvas. And it’s not just any digital canvas, but one that has all the power of the Windows 10 operating system and has the great Microsoft Teams software built in. Going back to what I said earlier about the value of familiarity and comfort in the way we work: This is another way that Microsoft is delivering that kind of experience.
Surface Hub 2S is an interactive device that acts as a meeting platform, digital whiteboard, and so much more. Bring it into a conference room, huddle room or open area and you’ve created a space for teamwork. That includes the ability to use Microsoft Teams to collaborate with remote workers, replicating the great experience you’re used to from your PC. It also includes video conferencing so you can see your teammates while working on shared content in real time. Here are just a handful of the features that make the Surface Hub 2S so valuable:
The Surface Hub 2S is the tool you’ll want to have to bring your remote teams together, work from anywhere in the office, and have an easy, fluid collaboration experience among the talent that drives your company’s success.
If you’re new to Microsoft Teams or Surface Hub 2S, or you’re new to remote collaboration, there are experts at AVI-SPL who are ready to answer your questions and give you guidance. Whatever questions you have, ask them, as our representatives can discuss:
It can seem like a lot to take in, but keep in mind that all of these features and benefits are meant to serve your clear goals: better team collaboration and a better way of organizing you and your teams’ work. I would venture that a lot of us are looking forward to the day we can get back into the office and have that in-person experience. But for those of us who are set up to collaborate from home, we know how easy it is to be just as productive and contribute just as much from wherever we choose to set up our personal devices. Our current circumstances will pass; what will remain is the freedom, flexibility, and support that tools like Microsoft Teams and Surface Hub 2S bring to our work lives.
Read AVI-SPL’s eBook “From Sim Labs to Huddle Spaces” to find out how to attract more students to your school with interactive displays and stand out in a competitive market. Providing modern technology like simulation labs and huddle spaces can also encourage alumni to support your organization after graduation.
To give but one example, technologies like augmented and virtual reality are expanding the opportunity for immersive experiences. Interactive displays are helping deliver those experiences in spaces that benefit learners who are making discoveries on their own, and those who are collaborating and solving challenges as a group.
This eBook, made with insight from NEC, shares five ways your school can use technology to help students enter the workforce. It also explains how interactive displays support workforce readiness by helping students build communities, drive research and innovation, support collaborative learning, and more.
Make the most of your time at InfoComm 2019 by taking AVI-SPL’s Guided Technology Tours of select partner booths, where we’ll highlight prominent digital workplace video and UCC solutions. Each of our five tours is curated by AVI-SPL and features the guidance of subject matter experts from our leading vendor partners as well as your AVI-SPL hosts.
We’ll begin the tours at AVI-SPL booth 3852 in the Orange County Convention Center. From there, we’ll spend about 15 minutes at each partner booth to learn about solutions that improve collaboration, engagement, productivity, and talent attraction/retention in your workplace. At the conclusion of each tour, we’ll raffle prizes at our booth.
Register early to reserve your space. Registration will also be available prior to each tour at our booth. Tours include:
Our tours will visit the booths for Barco, Biamp, Cisco, Crestron, Exterity, HARMAN, Legrand, LG, Mersive, MultiTaction, NEC Display, Onelan, Poly, Samsung, Shure, Sonic Foundry, and Sony. There will be plenty to learn from these vendor partners, and taking our guided tours is a great way to efficiently allocate your time while at the show.
At InfoComm 2019, AVI-SPL will use a MultiTaction interactive video wall to share the story of digital workplace transformation. By touching images on the display wall, our staff will bring up content that explains how digital workplace transformation helps organizations improve their business outcomes.
MultiTaction creates interactive digital displays that people use to explore content — such as training materials or company information — and to collaborate in real time. For example, your staff can use the MT Canvus software to share and annotate content in real time among participants at different locations. Your company may use this and other MultiTaction solutions to:
AVI-SPL used the MultiTaction iWall to great success earlier this year at ISE 2019, and we’ll be using it again at InfoComm 2019, InfoComm is North America’s biggest AV show and will be held at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando from June 8 to June 14. Stop by AVI-SPL booth 3852 to see the MultiTaction board in action and learn how we can help your organization improve its operations by being more agile and collaborative.