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Supporting Data-Driven Meetings in Business

While it’s tempting to blame bad meetings on boring presentations or poorly designed slides, the real culprit could be the technology in use. Legacy AV technology forces us to adopt meeting styles that hinder our ability to operate at our highest level. The “single speaker with a video cable” meeting standard is inefficient and wasteful of people’s time and corporate resources.
 
The Changing Taxonomy of Meetings
The days of scheduling the hourlong meeting are numbered. For decades, the hourlong time block was the standard in meeting length, in part because it was an easy way to divide the day. But is also accounted for seven to 10 minutes for figuring how to set up a meeting using complicated room technology, then the same amount of time to tear one down. Productive meeting time typically lasted for 40 minutes or more.
 
Now that content sharing is simpler, meetings can start up faster. At the same time, we’ve seen a corresponding growth in the use of huddle rooms for content sharing over other types of meeting spaces. According to Frost & Sullivan, there are now more than 33 million huddle rooms in use worldwide.
 
Meetings today often revolve around data and data analysis. When we gather around a big screen in a conference room, it’s usually to evaluate and discuss topics that are supported by content. There’s a reason we bring terabytes of images, videos, and live applications to meetings. Content builds authority, creates trust among team members, supports storytelling, and accelerates groups toward decisions. The level of collaboration in live, often ad hoc meetings requires the ability to seamlessly share what each participant is working on with everyone else -- directly from each person’s device. If sharing is difficult, it will disrupt the flow of the discussion and collaboration, and teams risk falling back into presentation mode.
 
By making full use of the devices we bring to meetings -- to share, control, and interact with content -- we deliver the power of content sharing to all parties, on demand, and without the need to learn specific room systems or plug-in cables. Group members are left free to highlight important data in real time. Successful, data-driven meetings must have the right technology infrastructure to support this type of wireless collaboration.
 
Designing Data-Driven Meeting Environments
Legacy hardware AV solutions lack the necessary flexibility to shape the spaces that today’s meetings require. Hardware tends to be designed for specific capabilities and lacks broad, platform-like features. Content-sharing for productive meetings is so important that it’s caused enterprises to rethink their entire display infrastructure.
 
Thanks to technology, meeting environments are no longer confined to conference or huddle rooms. Ad hoc exchanges can take place in hallways, around desks, and during commutes. Meeting participants must be able to quickly access and share content via smartphones, tablets, and remote displays from any location in order to highlight data.
 
Wireless content sharing and collaboration tools are great options to support data-centric meetings in huddle and transition spaces. Because these tools are easy to set up and can handle multiple participants sharing content simultaneously, they encourage successful collaboration. According to data collected from our AI engines that monitor meeting room behavior and performance, meetings in huddle spaces are 35% shorter than those in conference rooms. Additionally, the findings show that 33% more content sharing takes place in these smaller meetings than in larger ones.
 
Tips to Support Ad Hoc and Huddle Room Meeting Culture
  • Set a Goal -- Since ad hoc meetings don’t usually lend themselves to formal agendas, the organizers of these impromptu meetings should set an objective to keep all parties focused on the intended outcome.
  • Keep the Meeting Short -- Meetings tend to last for as long as they’re scheduled. Time-boxing meetings into 15-minute increments can amplify the creativity and focus of participants.
  • Be Flexible -- Since ad hoc meetings take place in just about any workspace, organizations should support collaboration and content-sharing technology in a variety of spaces above and beyond conference rooms.
  • Keep it Small -- Small teams prevent social loafing, in which individual contributions are seen as less valuable since a number of people share the same task, according to research. Limiting the number of participants facilitates better analysis and collaboration in meeting spaces.
Enterprises today shouldn’t rely on meeting room solutions that came out of telephony. Instead, they should rethink how conference calls, video conferences, and ad hoc meetings can take place in the context of content sharing and data-driven meeting experiences.