More and more businesses are supplementing their conference rooms with huddle rooms—casual, smaller spaces that can be used as spontaneous meeting places for teams. Although they might only seat four to six individuals, huddle rooms offer a valuable opportunity for impromptu meetings and collaboration with stakeholders, especially when augmented with innovative communications technology solutions.
The cornerstone of any huddle room is a large video display that can serve multiple purposes. The screen can be used to show presentations or documents, or it can facilitate videoconferencing. However, the most powerful huddle rooms go beyond simple video displays. Forward-thinking companies can repurpose the huddle room to offer employees the ability to tap into the vast wealth of content that exists within every enterprise and use it to be more productive.
Huddle rooms that enable users to launch and share visual communications channels such as KPI dashboards, team progress charting, and big data analytics can bring an entirely new dimension to meetings. Channel content adds an exciting new level of employee engagement and creative opportunities. Collaborating around live data, multimedia content, and contextual news provides a more rounded and complete picture and delivers a depth of knowledge that is typically not available through more traditional A/V technologies. Employees can not only hold videoconferences with colleagues, but they can annotate and share live charts and statistics, call up historical trends, and run video content. With these next-generation huddle rooms, even the most spontaneous meeting can be a conduit for users to access and work with the most up-to-date content.
Integrators are well aware that more and more companies are transforming their work spaces to offer better small-group collaboration, including multiple huddle rooms. Though these spaces may be small in square footage, the added power of innovative visual communications solutions ensures that presentations and brainstorming sessions will be inspired, effective, and always leveraging the most current content.
Vern Freedlander is vice president of production services for Montréal-based X2O Media, a Barco company. X2O Media is a leading software developer of real-time visual communications solutions that significantly improve communications throughout the enterprise. With more than 20 years of broadcast television experience as a producer, director and executive, Freedlander oversees all of X2O Media’s content initiatives. He can be reached at [email protected].
