As Staff Returns to Offices, Ensure Your Technology Is a Help and Not a Hindrance

If much of your professional workforce has been working remotely, they undoubtedly have gotten used to the ease of collaboration and conferencing tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams. These applications make it easy to schedule a meeting, use audio and video, and share screens, presentations, and other information.  

Depending on your system in the office, all those things may surprisingly be harder to do. Of course, there are reasons for this. You may have legacy videoconferencing systems that are not compatible with the latest tools. When working at home, workers know how to manage environmental factors like lighting and temperature. In the office, that may be a little more difficult because of centralized building controls. And what seems like simple things such as projecting a screen from a laptop or tablet for a meeting sometimes turns into an exercise in frustration. 

 All these potential foibles can be solved with the right investments in modern commercial automation solutions for your Long Island, NY property. Keep reading below to see how you can enable your staff to work at the office just as easily as working from home.  

SEE ALSO: A Robust Audio System Sets the Mood in Your Restaurant 

ENABLING INFORMATION SHARING 

If you've been to enough meetings, no doubt you remember a time when the presenter could not connect the laptop to the conference room screen. The cable was incorrect, something was wrong with an input, or the resolution and aspect ratio were off to the point of distraction. You can equip your conference rooms with solutions that enable anyone to share information from almost any device.  

Professionals use iOS and Android phones and tablets, Chromebooks, Windows, Macintosh laptops, and occasionally Linux laptops. The latest systems have both connected and wireless ways to enable easy screen sharing, so no one wastes valuable minutes with many people waiting while others figure out the AV. This becomes even more critical as your teams work with remote teams in other conference rooms and remote workers at home. 

Whether you have a projector, flat-panel, or digital whiteboard in your meeting space, you want a system compatible with a wide range of devices and collaboration platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and others. 

COMMUNICATING CLEARLY 

It’s difficult to be productive if you can’t hear or see people clearly. You don’t want a meeting room where people have to strain to hear from a single garbled speakerphone or are forced to project their voice to be heard crowded around a microphone. Make meetings natural with the latest conferencing cameras and audio solutions.  

For example, you can use distributed fixed microphones around a table or a microphone array embedded in the conference table or ceiling with sophisticated processing that picks up voices all around the room. Video cameras with wide-angle views or pan, tilt, and zoom capabilities can ensure that everyone gets a chance to participate in the meeting. 

The latest solutions can integrate these systems with the most used videoconferencing solutions and make it as easy as pushing a button to start a videoconference with many participants.  

MANAGING THE ENVIRONMENT 

A meeting room that is too cold or too warm will cause discomfort and distraction. Similarly, poor lighting can also detract from the meeting. With many buildings having centralized control of HVAC systems, conference room participants may not have any control over temperature. The key is to enable local control for comfort while still maintaining building automation for efficiency and keeping a handle on energy usage. Using smart conference room controls, you can enable your professionals to manage the environment for a meeting, brightening or dimming lights and setting a comfortable temperature.  

Better yet, automate specific activity scenes for a room – video conferences, presentations, large meetings, small meetings, using flat panel displays or projectors, and classes – and set the optimal settings for these activities to be activated with one button on a touch screen or other room controller. Your workforce can get meetings started faster, run them productively, and focus on the work rather than meeting logistics. 

Modernize your commercial properties to boost your teams’ productivity. Connect with our team by filling out our online contact form to schedule a free consultation. We look forward to working with you.