If you are setting up a meeting, getting good engagement from your employees is of tantamount importance. A study by The Muse suggests that unproductive and disengaged meetings come to a staggering cost of $37 billion every year.
As the world changes and we switch more to having remote meetings, it becomes even more crucial to ensure that your team members are engaged - but on the flip side, there are plenty of reasons why meeting room technology can increase engagement and productivity.
So, you might be wondering ‘how do you keep a remote team engaged?’. There are plenty of ways to do this using modern technology, which can often be applied to in-person meetings too. It all comes down to having the right equipment, and utilising the features to make the meeting run smoothly.
From the get-go, it is vital to have the right meeting room technology to increase engagement and productivity. When working in a huddle room or conference room in an office, it is important to have the right conference room equipment setup for all employees - and when working remotely, it is equally significant to ensure that every employee has the right technology for them.
These are the best meeting room technology solutions:
If you are reading this, you might be wondering ‘how do I make an interactive conference call?’. It’s actually very easy, and you don’t need much more technology than an in-person meeting.
For a remote huddle or conference room, a similar conference set-up is a good idea. All employees will need a device that can connect remotely to the interactive display, as well as a high quality webcam and microphone (often these are included in laptops, but it might help the employee to have noise cancelling external equipment). A conference calling software or programme, like Zoom or Google Hangouts, is also important.
While remote meetings can seem very daunting, there is plenty of evidence to prove that they can, in fact, be more engaging than traditional meetings - in fact, Wainhouse Research discovered that a staggering 94% of people who had virtual meetings found them to be more productive than traditional meetings. This is thanks to modern technology and its fantastic ways to capture people’s attention.
One of the biggest advantages of remote work is that people can be hired from all over the world. The State of Remote Work Study in 2019 found that 71% of businesses have at least some remote workers, with 31% being fully remote. Often, these remote workers will come from different cultures and backgrounds, and will have fresh perspectives to help with the task in hand.
What does this mean for remote meetings? Experts in different fields can be added to the meeting at a drop of a hat, meaning that productive conversation can be instigated with people who really know what they are doing. This can help increase engagement as well, as different people with fresh ideas can really help colleagues stay motivated and think more creatively about any issues that they may have.
Recent research has shown that the creative process is not linear, which in fact means that technology has the capacity to mimic it. When we are creating, planning, and brainstorming, we go back over things, delete things, and add things in places.
With meeting room technology, this can easily be done. Imagine if you are planning on a piece of paper, and every idea that gets vetoed has to be scribbled out. Wouldn’t that be difficult to focus on?
Instead, imagine a shiny interactive display, where any ideas can be flawlessly deleted and others added in the right place. This kind of setup is much easier to engage with than the previous.
Before meeting room technology was really popular, the main collaboration was intra company collaboration. However, due to the advance of modern technology, it is a lot easier to have a brief chat to someone from a different business, to offer expertise and share ideas.
Inter company collaboration - or external collaboration - is, therefore, a significant way that businesses can grow, and it is all thanks to meeting room technology.
Efficient meetings are more engaged and productive meetings, and having modern meeting room technology is much more efficient than having old interactive whiteboards, physical whiteboards or pen and paper. Slideshows can be presented with ease and websites quickly loaded. All of our interactive displays at Avocor are easy to use and work consistently well.
This study shows that 68% of people asked feel that there will be some tech issues in a traditional, in-person conference meeting. Using rooms for multiple purposes and having to reset and reconnect technology, often with different devices, is bound to cause some issues.
However, standardising technology and making sure that each person is fully versed in how their individual technology works can help this a lot and rapidly increase engagement and productivity.
Using tools like an interactive display in every meeting, that is standardised and operated by someone who knows the technology well, is hugely beneficial when it comes to engagement and productivity in the workplace.
Similarly, in virtual meetings, the use of individual devices that are operated by each owner makes troubleshooting issues a lot easier than having different devices in conference rooms.
The use of interactive tools, which meeting room technology allows, can improve engagement and productivity in the workplace no end.
Some features that meeting room software allows are virtual whiteboards which can be written on and annotated by any team member, screen sharing, as well as in-app games and quizzes. Meetings can also be recorded and shared for employees to watch back.
The right meeting room technology can improve your workplace no end. Whether you have a physical workplace with high-tech equipment, or are relying completely on technology in a virtual workplace, devices like an interactive display and the right individual computer devices are essential for a productive workplace.
Unproductivity comes at a huge cost, so ensuring that meetings and workplaces are running as efficiently as possible is of tantamount importance. Meeting room technology can help with this in so many ways; from making meetings more fun, to presenting effectively, to connecting with people all over the world.
Modern technology is really changing the way we work - and thanks to new and developing inventions, it will carry on improving for years to come.
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