Meeting for real: The era of borderless boardrooms

By Rajeev Singh

When the pandemic struck the world in 2020, it threw a curveball at even the highly well-prepared organisations. Everything from revenue to stock prices and corporate transactions was affected when operations came to a halt. It was a crucial time for top-level decision-makers with layoffs and office downsizing on the cards. With the urgency and restrictions brought about by the lockdowns, board meetings had to be called remotely, introducing what has now become the new normal for almost all workspaces.

A serious shift to video calls
As companies adopt a more flexible, hybrid style of working, meeting participants are no longer confined to the physical walls of the boardroom. It is now required of them to become more at ease with the highly interactive video conferencing. With more and more companies now pivoting to allow more home-based work, seeing remote peers during hybrid meetings has become a must. For this reason, organisations need to take stock of the tools they currently have installed in their boardrooms. Does the firm have sumptuous tools to organise varied large-scale meetings in the hybrid working model?

The importance of seeing co-workers on camera
Visuality makes a big difference in this digital age. To make up for the lack of physical interaction, seeing your colleagues fosters a social connection that can only be established with video. Turning the camera on adds a layer of accountability, not just preventing attendees from losing attention but also demonstrate a professional dynamic.

Futureproofing the boardroom
What sets apart present-day meeting solutions from their predecessors is the scalability and amount of interactivity they offer. Today, technologies with integrated cloud whiteboards give multiple remote users the ability to collaborate in the same space in real-time. Stakeholders can give real-time feedback and can even edit content directly irrespective of their presence in the same boardroom or joined from a remote location.

The ideal standard boardrooms would bring in efficient and seamless attributes for the future.

A hybrid boardroom offers :
Interactive: Hybrid boardrooms are equipped with smart technologies which enable real-time co-working between office-based and remote peers. These include interactive displays with cloud white-boarding and video conferencing setups.

Higher engagement: The audio-visual presence of all participants via their live video feeds allows them to engage with each other freely as if in the same room.

Collaborative cloud white-boarding: The participants play an immersive role as they work on the same cloud whiteboard. While they all see the content together they can also modify items in real-time.

Convenient recording and sharing: Sessions can be instantly recorded and files thus shared can be exported to all attendees. These files may include the re-editable sessions on the cloud whiteboard and further re-developed at a later time.

Flexible layout: Hybrid boardrooms are equipped with smart devices that foster real-time co-working between office-based and remote peers. These include interactive displays with cloud white-boarding and video conferencing setups.

As several organisations adopt different hybrid working models, meeting rooms are becoming more and more interactive—a change that will also be reflected in boardrooms.

The writer is managing director, BenQ India


Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz

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