Communication and teamwork have always been key components of productive meeting sessions since effective collaboration can produce innovative ideas and improve the overall quality of results. While teams would previously communicate face-to-face, businesses now have employees based all over the world, meaning that they have to find new ways to encourage teams to work together.
Perhaps more importantly, the culture of meeting sessions is also continuing to evolve, with workers now preferring activity-based, interactive meetings which get them fully engaged with the discussion. The days of monotonous one-way presentations are finally coming to an end, and modern organizations now need to create much more collaborative meeting environments.
Fortunately, modern video conferencing solutions and other advances in technology are designed to improve the meeting experience. Not only do these solutions help teams connect from all over the world, but they can make your meetings more dynamic, engaging and, above all, collaborative. Kinly takes a look at how technology can improve your meeting rooms.
The Problem with Meeting Rooms
Meetings have always been essential for collaboration and building strong working relationships. However, a growing number of employees now consider most meetings to be an enormous waste of time, rather than the collaborative and creative sessions they’re supposed to be, with many attendees feeling unable to truly participate.
This is particularly the case with remote employees, who can eventually become disengaged from the rest of the team if the proper collaboration tools haven’t been implemented. After all, if they’re struggling to follow what’s being said and how the meeting is progressing, then they’re simply unable to get involved with the discussion.
Unfortunately, far too many meetings prove detrimental to productivity and efficiency, with studies finding that the average UK worker spends around 13 days a year in unproductive meetings. Poor planning and technological issues are often cited as the primary causes of such poor productivity, but many of these problems can be eradicated by equipping your meeting rooms with the right technology.
For many businesses, unproductive meetings are becoming a real problem. Research from Doodle shows that these inefficient sessions could cost British businesses a combined £45 billion in 2019 alone, with 67% of all meetings considered to be “unproductive”. Fortunately, the introduction of innovative new technology can help you inspire collaboration and ensure teams always make the most of their time in meetings.
Encourage Interaction
When attendees don’t feel involved during a meeting, they’ll inevitably become distracted and unengaged. In fact, studies show that over 90% of attendees admit to multi-tasking during meeting sessions, with 49% using the time to work on completely unrelated tasks. While 57% of workers still admit to multi-tasking over the phone, only 5% become so distracted on video calls.
Video conferencing provides attendees with a genuine sense of connection, instantly increasing their engagement with other participants and making it easier for them to work together. Modern conferencing solutions will also allow attendees to share and annotate files in real-time, while the introduction of a digital whiteboard is absolutely ideal for creative brainstorming sessions.
This technology encourages teams to interact and create together during meeting sessions, instead of spending their time simply straining to hear what other people have to say. By utilizing the right technology for your requirements, you can provide teams with everything they need to collaborate right at their fingertips.
Simplify Communication
Video conferencing allows attendees to connect from all over the world, providing them with face-to-face communication which can prove so invaluable to effective collaboration. The high-resolution displays and crystal clear audio of modern conferencing technology could even make attendees feel as though they’re all in the same room together.
This hassle-free method of communication allows teams to meet at any time, in any place, presenting almost limitless collaboration possibilities and removing the problems caused by long distances. Since attendees won’t have to travel to an arranged meeting space, this reduces the overall time taken up by sessions and allows teams to work together regularly.
Workers can now connect across multiple devices, with the most popular collaboration tools offering user-friendly interfaces and making it incredibly easy to actually join meetings.
Speed Up Decision Making
Modern technology helps teams, clients, and collaborators to work together quickly, allowing them to respond instantly to any urgent situations and reach much faster decisions. This improved efficiency will save your business both time and money, with the visual elements of this technology allowing hosts to set much clearer agendas and ensure the meeting remains completely focused on the task in hand.
When attendees are all on the same page and up to speed on the discussion, they’re in a much better position to work together.
When your meeting spaces are equipped with the right technology, the collaboration will become faster, easier and more effective. The right tools for you will depend entirely upon your own circumstances and how you want your teams to connect, but the ease and convenience of modern meeting room technology are never in doubt.
