Huddle Rooms & Video Conferencing: The Courtship is Over

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It’s only been a year since Millennials surpassed Gen Xers as the largest generation in the U.S workforce, and this year, Gen Z is entering the workforce. While the full impact of these workforce changes is still to be seen, a few clear trends are emerging. According to Dan Schawbel, research director at Future Workplace, office design as a way to increase collaboration and attract top talent is one of the top five workplace trends in 2016.

At the same time, technology is playing a key role in what it means to work and collaborate. Rightsize, a company that specializes in planning, furnishing and servicing offices, says that huddle rooms are among the top office space planning trends. And just last year, Wainhouse Research reported that the rise of huddle rooms and small meeting spaces will play a critical role in collaboration. Wainhouse partner and senior analyst Andrew Davis believes there are somewhere between 30 million and 50 million of these spaces around the world, and most lack support for collaborative technologies. Zig Serafin, Microsoft corporate  vice president of Skype Business Services, claims that 97 percent of meeting rooms in the world are not equipped for modern video conferencing.

But outfitting 30 – 50 million huddle rooms with the latest in collaboration technology doesn’t need to be a daunting task. The good news is that trends like cloud-based video and web conferencing services are making ubiquitous video conferencing a viable option. And while traditional video conferencing equipment can run many thousands of dollars per room, businesses can now outfit their meetings spaces at a fraction of the cost.

In a couple weeks, Nemertes Research will share the results of a recent study on how to successfully bring video conferencing to small conference rooms and huddle spaces. The findings will provide further data showing that huddle rooms are on the rise, and employees increasingly demand access to video conferencing to improve team collaboration. Nemertes analyst Irwin Lazar will be hosting a webinar that explores workplace trends around video conferencing in small meeting rooms and provide specific recommends for achieving a successful rollout that supports a multi-vendor, multi-application approach.

You can register for the Nemertes webinar here. And if you have experiences you can share on how to tackle collaboration technology in the huddle room, we’d love to hear them.

Missed the webinar? You can access are replay here.