The phrase “I’m going to work” no longer means “I’m going to get up at dawn, slip into a suit and start the long drive to the office.” In fact, it might just mean walking a few steps to the guest room or, if you’re lucky, a new shed in the garden.
Our homes have become classrooms, offices and gymnasiums thanks to the pandemic and the closures. And even now that we hope to see the end in sight, the return to “normal” may never happen.
The nature of how and where we work has changed forever and as business leaders it’s time to accept that work is no longer a place: it’s what you do and how you do it. . The traditional office environment was already changing before the pandemic arrived. Improving the capabilities of the data infrastructure, the ongoing digital transformation and the corresponding increase in the sophistication of communications were already paving the way for a new world of work.
The Covid-19 has been an essential catalyst for this change in work habits and a massive accelerator of the digital transformation which is already reshaping the way we work. Data from industry analysts confirms this. A Gartner study shows that 74% of companies will definitely move to a more distant workforce. By 2024, Gartner expects there will be 600 million teleworkers worldwide.
Our customers echo this and tell us that in the future they believe all of their meetings will have at least one remote participant. They’ll all require video links, and meeting room experiences will need to improve dramatically to accommodate that.
For too long in the collaboration industry, we’ve built conference rooms that looked and functioned exactly like the last 100 rooms before them. We must now offer our customers a comprehensive approach to their business infrastructure. We still need to connect people, spaces and technology, but we need to do so in a way that creates equality among meeting participants, regardless of their location.
This means changes in our conference rooms at the office. Analysts estimate that of the roughly 50 million conference rooms worldwide, less than 10% are compatible with video. Obviously, this will no longer support the dramatically increased number of remote workers. Seamlessly combining teammates who are both in and out of the office so that they can work, whether that’s informal brainstorming or critical million dollar conversations with clients, is a complex challenge.
Fortunately, some technologies already exist, like automatic cameras for meeting rooms and microphones that cancel out unwanted background noise. Others are underway, including video meeting indexing and analysis, automatic transcriptions, and simplifying meeting launch.
This change is going to be one of our industry’s biggest challenges, but also one of its most exciting opportunities. We need to connect people, technology and spaces so that it doesn’t make a difference whether someone is physically present or not. This is the way of the future and we are on the right track.
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Originally posted on Business Reporter
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Source: www.independent.co.uk
This notice was published: 2021-09-01 09:50:17
