In five years’ time, millennials will comprise 50 percent of the workforce. These are people who have grown up understanding what surfing the web means before they knew that surfing had anything to do with the ocean, people for whom the idea of a non ‘smart’ mobile phone is an alien concept. Indeed, for this generation, the traditional desktop technology endemic of many corporate workplaces may feel like a throwback.
In parallel with the evolution of an increasingly digital workforce, trends are emerging in the way office-bound workers get together to deliver productive output. Real-time communications, richer collaboration technologies, more distributed workforces and more sophisticated tools for delivering the output of workers – from computer-aided design to augmented reality modelling – are giving rise to different trends in the way we gather, collaborate and produce our daily work in modern businesses. Analyst firm Wainhouse Research detailed three of these trends in a recent whitepaper, which we will examine here.
You need a leadership team that acknowledges the reality of this modern working practice and will commit to changes
Meetings matter
The first of the aforementioned trends that Wainhouse found is that today’s employee spends a significant amount of time in meetings. After speaking to decision makers within 200 enterprises and, therefore, 200 varied and different office spaces, the extent of this was evident. The average decision maker reported that they attended just under two meetings a day, or 9.3 meetings a week.
Wainhouse also discovered a subgroup of ‘power meeters’. Making up a third of those surveyed, power meeters spend nearly half of their time in meetings (18 meetings a week, or 3.6 meetings a day). And elite power meeters, consisting of the top five percent of respondents, attend over 27 meetings a week, or almost 5.5 meetings a day.
The challenge for modern workers, collaborating with colleagues in different offices and countries, is that the effort required to coordinate the efforts of a distributed team can be overwhelming. Not only do you need to make meetings – virtual or otherwise – productive, you need to find ways to use them to improve the machinery of the team, to help people work better, faster and more effectively.
The modern meeting
The second trend identified was that a lot of meetings are evolving past the traditional format. More than half of the meetings Wainhouse’s respondents attended featured a mix of live and virtual attendees. In the power meeter segment alone, this rises to over 80 percent. The more meetings you attend, the more likely it is that you’ll have virtual attendees present.
Video has fast become a key way to engage virtual respondents more fully in meetings. The average respondent includes video in almost half (45 percent) of their meetings. Power meeters use video in over 60 percent of their meetings, and the very top 20 percent use video in over 80 percent of their meetings. The last few years has seen video go from a relatively unusual novelty to becoming the new standard for collaboration in a busier, more distributed enterprise.
However, the most surprising aspect of all this is that a relatively small proportion of these virtual, visual meetings actually take place in traditional meeting rooms, equipped with meeting room video technology, conference tables and so on. Less than 40 percent of meetings take place in meeting rooms; the remainder take place from home offices, on the road, from desks and beyond. These conferences are triggered in new ways as well; many are initiated via a smartphone or tablet, rather than a laptop or landline.
These three aspects of office worker behaviour – meetings with virtual participants, connected visually, from any and every location – have an impact on the way we convene, run and expect outcomes from all types of meetings, large and small.
Workplace transformation
Of course, our offices cannot remain unaffected when faced with such significant changes in the behaviour of the staff within them. With people telecommuting, working remotely and working in distributed teams, and with others still working from customer sites or partner offices, the need for desk real estate is on the decline, and the demand for collaborative meeting spaces – formal meeting rooms or otherwise – is on the rise.
Indeed, on this issue, the study found that the number of decision makers anticipating the growth in the number of large and medium meeting rooms in the next 24 months is in significant decline, whereas other meeting spaces – smaller meeting rooms and new mini ‘huddle’ rooms for spontaneous, unbooked meetings – are expected to become significantly more prevalent and in-demand.
This transformation is setting up the context for the third trend – the growth of the ‘collaboration enterprise’ – a workspace in which the practical reality of the virtual, visual, anywhere meeting is catered for, through facilities, technology and cultural empowerment, and in which staff who spend a significant proportion of their time in meetings can do so productively, with maximum output and maximum efficiency.
The future, now
There are many enabling factors in the collaborative enterprise: you need a leadership team that acknowledges the reality of this modern working practice and will commit to changes in physical workspace to deliver spaces to huddle, to meet and to engage in the more formal, substantial large meetings that remain a significant part of the mix.
In response to a very real demand from customers to deliver a more effective experience from huddle rooms, Logitech has just launched the ConferenceCam Connect; a sleek, portable meeting room camera designed to support a better experience for businesses that are looking to empower those employees who want to bring virtual participants into their collaborative huddles and small meetings.
Given the diversity of end-user technology, the spontaneous nature of these meetings, and the complexity of corporate information infrastructure, any enabling technology needs to be simple, accessible, desirable and – crucially – compatible with any system people are likely to be using, avoiding the fiddly steps of connecting unnecessary cables, configuring displays and so on.
Wainhouse’s paper concludes: “The way users get their work done is undergoing a dramatic, historic change. We find this new work environment embraced by work-life-harmony-seeking millennials and driven by highly collaborative interaction. Technology has transcended the ability to simply enable virtual collaboration, making it effective and desirable – with few barriers, anyone and everyone can instantly become engaged and help with the task at hand.”