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Q&A on Supporting Productivity in the Workplace

AV Events

Beau Wilder of Poly is an expert in what companies can do to shift their organizations toward the future of work. In the Q&A below, I spoke with Wilder, Poly’s VP of innovation waves and new products, about creating a workplace that enables people to be their best. 

Q: Why is workplace transformation so important?
Wilder: We’re all in this war for talent. The companies winning are the ones recognizing that their most important assets are their people.

We can work anywhere, anytime on any device using UCC technology. Those solutions have allowed work policies to be flexible, so we need spaces where we can make best use of that technology and its capabilities. If you don’t provide those spaces, people will vote with their feet and move on to a better situation.

Q: Considering the ability for people to work from anywhere, how important is the workplace?
Wilder: Even though research shows people are more productive at home, most choose to go back to work because they miss the collaboration. We want people to work together and feel empowered when they’re in the office. It’s that cross-pollination where new thinking happens. We’re always looking for the next big idea, and so we need to make it easier for people in the workplace to work together.

Q: How did the open office take hold as the new template for the workplace?
Wilder: We thrive as humans when we’re outdoors. The open office offers flexibility in creating an environment that mirrors the one outside. In these spaces, we’ve seen huge trends with health and wellness. Biophilic design that includes natural light and greenery sets people up to be their best. When people are happier and healthier, you have more productivity and creative output. But the open office comes with its own set of challenges.

Q: What are some of those challenges?
Wilder: Although companies have raced to open offices, some didn’t do it thoughtfully. It can be hard to work while people are collaborating near you. Therefore, we need to focus on a human-centric design in the office so we can be at our best by using technology that blends distracting speech into the background.

Q: What are the solutions for these challenges?
Wilder: Do your homework ahead of time and bring in your vendor partners early. You’ll also want to include your users in the journey toward workplace transformation. Focus on the human experience above the cost-savings. Collaboration in meeting spaces should be intuitive and easy. When you design for open spaces, consider the activity that will be happening and build in choice that allows for a personalized experience.

Q: What’s a realistic expectation for companies that want to transform their workplaces?
Wilder: Ask targeted questions of your staff. Find out where things aren’t working. As you design open spaces, let the technology do the heavy lifting. 

This process continues even after you’ve made the transformation. Understand that you won’t get your building right from day one. But by collecting data like occupancy and use of technology, you can be proactive in refining it.

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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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Video Shows Benefits of AVI-SPL Services Team

AVI-SPL

Thanks to the teamwork and expertise of AVI-SPL technicians throughout four global service operations centers (GSOC) worldwide, AVI-SPL offers businesses 24/7 proactive monitoring and management of their technology to ensure a high-quality experience with meetings and collaboration. You can see and hear those technicians talk about the value they provide in this AVI-SPL video.

From GSOCs in Denver, Philadelphia, UK, and Germany, AVI-SPL uses its Symphony platform to monitor and manage its clients’ AV and UC assets throughout their estate. It also automates their meeting scheduling, launching, monitoring, management and experience. Symphony provides customized analytics that show the frequency of room usage and the quality of the meeting experience so that companies can refine their investments and meet their business goals. 

Watch the AVI-SPL Video of Its GSOC

This video shows that AVI-SPL is much more than a global AV and collaboration systems integrator. We are a digital services provider that makes it easier for organizations to use and manage their solutions. You’ll also get a look at our Customer Experience Center, where you can explore new solutions and see how they would work in your environment. Toward the end of the video, you’ll see statistics that show the positive impact our GSOC support has had for organizations like yours.

Check out the video here, and share it with colleagues and those in your company who want their AV and collaboration systems to be easy to use while bringing people together so they can focus on the meeting, not the technology.

Special thanks to VideoLink’s VL Creative team for creating this video. And thanks to all members of our GSOC teams around the world for helping companies improve their ability to innovate, solve problems, and efficiently take on their daily operations.

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How Higher Education Can Make the Most of Its Current Tech Assets

AV in Education

JLL, a prominent real estate service provider, notes that higher education is facing the largest demand for capital investments they’ve ever seen. By upgrading their facilities, schools can recruit students to innovative programs that support teaching and learning in exciting and engaging ways. However, universities are also feeling the pressure from reductions in federal aid, due to defaults on school loans. JLL states that 40 percent of student loan borrowers are expected to default on their loans by 2030, which is a data point used for federal aid qualification.

So the challenge for schools is this: how to approach its building projects in a cost-effective way as they deal with the pressures of losing the support of student loans.

Gain Business Intelligence

Once a higher ed school upgrades or builds a facility, reductions in cost can be achieved with the right technology platform in place. A platform, like AVI-SPL Symphony, can bring tactical and strategic business intelligence to these institutions. Let’s look at a pre and post platform deployment example.

Pre – No Actionable Business Intelligence: A building has 100 rooms with 450 technology devices, ranging from video conferencing to projectors to displays and everything in between, all from a multitude of manufacturers. A teacher, who needs to use the equipment in one of the rooms, discovers the systems don’t work. She makes do without them, runs her class, and may or may not reach out to IT. Because the solutions didn’t work, she stops using that room or technology. IT eventually finds out about the problem, sends out a technician, fixes the issue and moves on to the next issue.

Post – Tactical Business Intelligence: This same building’s rooms and devices are loaded onto a managed services platform like AVI-SPL Symphony. Let’s say there is an issue with technology, from anywhere in that building. Through auto-detection, thresholds and ticket creation, IT can proactively resolve this issue before it affects the teachers and students. When issues cannot be resolved quickly, IT can inform the teachers, who can then move their classes and minimize disruption.

Post – Strategic Business Intelligence: As device data is collected through the monitoring and management platform, schools can analyze what is happening within their spaces, including which ones are being used and why, which technologies are generating the most tickets, and what are the root causes of those tickets. This enables data-backed decisions to be made on how to repurpose and upgrade those areas.

“Rather than turning to new construction to accommodate academic needs, colleges and universities continue to make better use of the facilities they already have,” says David Houck, co-leader of JLL’s Higher Education practice. “Campus utilization studies, occupancy planning tools and centralized management of shared spaces can unlock significant efficiency and savings opportunities.”

Work with AVI-SPL to learn more about Symphony and how it can do for your university what it’s doing for Australia’s RMIT:

 

 

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Manage Your Company’s AV and UC With Symphony as a Service

AV as a service

On the worldwide stage of ISE 2019, AVI-SPL announced the availability and value of its Symphony as a Service (SYaaS), which makes it easy for organizations to monitor, manage and improve their collaboration estate, and provide a better user experience of their AV and UC systems.

The Symphony managed services platform is the engine that drives AVI-SPL’s award-winning managed services for its clients around the world. With SYaaS, that platform is available on a subscription basis. AV and IT departments can be proactive about their collaboration spaces and devices as they launch and manage video calls, and keep track of the quality of experience during meetings. Through the service’s mobile-friendly, web-based dashboard, staff will have real-time insight into an organization’s AV devices, video systems, and conference infrastructure.

Symphony as a Service also provides analytics about room and device usage so that companies have the business intelligence to make informed decisions about future investment in meeting spaces and collaboration technology.

The announcement has been covered by industry magazines like rAVe, Tech Decisions, AV Magazine, AV Network, and Commercial Integrator, which shared this video it recorded at ISE 2019.  Here, AVI-SPL’s SVP of Services Tim Riek explains the value of SYaaS.

 

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Discover the Future of Work With AVI-SPL at ISE 2019

AV Events

The world’s largest exhibition for AV and systems integration begins in less than 24 hours, and AVI-SPL is already there, getting ready to share its latest solutions and services that help companies enter the future of work.

At ISE 2019, guests to AVI-SPL booth 11-C155 will understand what we mean by digital workplace transformation and why it’s so valuable to organizations of all types. In short segments, our staff and special guests will use a five-panel MultiTaction display to explain:

You’ll find the times for these presentations at AVI-SPL’s ISE event website. At our website, you’ll also find a form for requesting a meeting with AVI-SPL representatives to answer your questions.

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