Teams of employees have moved from cubicles to collaboration spaces, and now they are moving to a remote environment where many of them work separately from others. This could be the result of offshoring, building teams where you find the best talent even if they are not local, or because the pandemic du jour is driving the principle of social distancing.

While software from Zoom and others can make it possible to hold virtual events with very little specialized equipment, there are manufacturers like Poly that will offer upgraded devices to make your meetings and events really striking. All this gear won’t make you a better manager and it can’t make your employees focus.

Below are four tips that can help you utilize your management skills with a remote workforce.

Interactive Meetings

It can be challenging for leaders who are accustomed to face to face feedback to try to use their same trick on a remote group. Of course, you can’t, but there are things you can do to make these meetings more engaging. In his LinkedIn article, William Balvanz of Voyant drives home the point that interaction is crucial by saying “feedback is important to be sure your meeting was of value.”

You can obtain feedback by actually asking direct questions to your attendees. If you can, distribute the topics across all of the team members on the meeting and have each one present for a few minutes each. And change it up by asking random people their thoughts on a given subject. You cannot run an interactive meeting as if you are delivering a sermon.

 “At various points in your presentation, you should stop speaking… This simple solution alone can help break up the sermon.” – William Balvanz

Consistent One on Ones

Even if you don’t actually meet face to face, you should not stop holding your one on ones on your normal intervals (if not more frequently). Cover what you have to, but be particularly focused on what is working for them, and what is not. Control the things you can (if they need to purchase a better headset, for instance) and empathize about the things you can’t. A sudden move to remote work can be very stressful and any uncertainty makes this worse. You should use point to point video whenever possible so you have what amounts to face to face contact.

Your one on ones may have been a very predictable practice before, make sure it remains consistent. Anything you can do to smooth the bumps in the road will be appreciated.

Contests

At the time of this writing the NCAA Tournament has been canceled and we are a long way away from fantasy football time. So what can you do during the months and weeks ahead. Contests are a good way to drive performance of one kind or another and offer a reward for most improved, best salesperson, etc. These are pretty standard and you probably already do something similar. 

Try to look at other things to evaluate, like social media presence. With most of the world’s workforce online, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Instagram are more important than before. You can set up contests to increase social media engagement, which can help your staff become more recognizable. 

You can also do a weight-loss or wellness program. The Harvard Business Review looked closely at the ROI on Weight Loss at Work, like reduced health care risks and fewer sick days of absence.

And yet another great approach is one that was deployed recently by a client of Prodoscore, who has developed an employee productivity software that enables businesses to measure utilization of software such as Unified Communications, Collaboration, and CRM. During a recent video blog interview with The UC Buyer, Crisantos Hajibrahim, Chief Evangelist with Prodoscore, shared some insights from a recent study completed by Jon Arnold, Principal at J Arnold & Associates, as well as sharing how many of their clients are implementing a scoring system.  In other words applying gamification to the use of productivity software.

“We have to make sure that people are using it, and that’s where the scoring comes in.  We’ve seen a huge correlation – we realized a 100% increase in adoption from one particular customer,” according to Crisantos. “When Prodoscore was deployed, they weren’t using the tools. Now that the employees get points for using the software, everyone is using it.  If they don’t use it, they don’t get credit.” 

Any way you put it, a little bit of healthy competition keeps your team members feeling more like a team.

Remote Team Building Events

Finally, team building events have been a mainstay of groups for decades, but all the traditional activities seem impossible when you are not in the same place.

Time Doctor has a great article about virtual team building activities that offers a lot of advice. One idea I thought was especially unique was the idea of a Live Remote Office, where you have a video chat get together. For a non-video alternative, set up a Skype, Slack, or Discord open chat to keep up the familiar office banter.

Companies like Zoom are making it easier for users to adopt video conferencing by creating an easy to use and intuitive interface combined with the features that create a more immersive experience for users. Just last week, they announced the addition of a virtual background feature to their platform, which enables Zoom customers to change the backgrounds to spice up remote calls.  According to Kevin Thomsen, Leader of Master Agent Channel Partners, in an interview this week with The UC Buyer “It just works and it is so simple. You have to look at trends, and ease of use.  It’s built for the millennial, which is where the entire workforce is going.”

If you have any doubt about how users are quickly adopting the new feature, just check out Zoom’s recent posts on their Twitter account, @Zoom_us, where you’ll see Zoom customers tweeting about their virtual experiences in the new reality of virtual events.

Conclusion

The workplace is changing, and the time tested skills you have honed through the years will necessarily need to be updated. You can still engage with your remote workers in ways that can keep you in charge of a productive team.

The post How to Drive Participation and Engagement with a Remote Workforce appeared first on The UC Buyer.

Businesses are on an unstoppable march towards efficient, open floor plan office spaces.   The first iteration of this was the Open Space design. This movement began to accelerate rapidly during the economic downturn in 2008 and was supported by several simultaneous technology and business trends.  These included enhanced mobility and BYOD, the rapid increase in the number of remote and at home workers and the increasing ubiquity of unified communications and collaboration solutions, like web and video communication tools, to tie everything together.  From a business perspective maximizing the use of costly office space make good sense as it saves companies a lot of money.  For example:

• Companies are leasing 33% less space per employee than they did just a decade ago
• Businesses have increased space utilization from 50% to 80-95%
• Organizations are now packing 7 workers in per 1000 sqft as opposed to 5 workers in just 2009

The Open Space design has evolved to purpose driven Free Address (unassigned) Space. While companies quickly realized that Open Office layouts created many more opportunities for employees to communicate and collaborate, they also led to more noise and distractions, both when they were trying to concentrate and while trying to collaborate in shared environments.   Having one big boardroom that everybody wanted/needed to use for meetings was not going to cut it, especially with private offices quickly disappearing.  A change of thinking in workspace design, layout and technology was necessary to keep employees productive and happy.  

Dig Deeper  Download the Whitepaper: Finding Agility, the Next Generation Workplace

A recent Harvard Business Review article highlighted the benefits and challenges of work environments and its impact on employee engagement and productivity:

In our study, 98% of the most highly engaged employees reported that they had “the ability to concentrate easily” in their workplace and that this attribute is a top factor in their satisfaction. They also scored high on “being able to work in teams without being disrupted” and “being able to choose where to work according to the task at hand”—other factors critical to high engagement and satisfaction. Conversely, highly disengaged and dissatisfied employees struggled with disruptions and felt they had very little control over where or how they worked. Only 15% said they could concentrate easily.

Clearly the answer is not as simple as leasing less space and throwing everyone into a big, noisy bullpen.

Next Generation Workspaces Provide Employees both the Flexibility to Easily Collaborate and the Privacy to Concentrate

To maximize the benefits of an open office environment, businesses have discovered that they need to provide employees with a multitude of flexible office space designs and layouts in which to accomplish two key goals:  1) collaborate with colleagues (in person or virtually) and 2) concentrate as a group or independently.  According to HBR:

There’s a natural rhythm to collaboration. People need to focus alone or in pairs to generate ideas or process information; then they come together as a group to build on those ideas or develop a shared point of view; and then they break apart again to take next steps. The more demanding the collaboration task is, the more individuals need punctuating moments of private time to think or recharge.

The first attempt and most visible answer to addressing this common workflow issue in open offices was the huddle room.  Huddle rooms, which first started gaining popularity as far back as 2008, are small conference rooms that can accommodate a handful of people for impromptu, collaborative meetings.  They may have started out as a converted office with a small table, a few chairs and a whiteboard, but that is quickly evolving.  A recent study by Wainhouse Research found that 55% of younger workers have been pushing conferencing managers for more video communication solutions in the workplace, while three quarters of all employees are demanding more mobile, flexible workplace locations and schedules.  As a result, Next Generation Workspaces are now equipped with video communication solutions that provide the ability to connect not only face-to-face, but with remote colleagues, customers and partners as well.  

So, while the huddle room may have been on the vanguard of this movement, many businesses quickly realized that one size definitely doesn’t fit all when it comes to the efficient use of office spaces, and as such they are moving to ensure the work environment is designed to maximize both collaboration and concentration.  A term that has been gaining traction to describe this effort is ‘Next Generation workplace’. To learn more about how leading businesses are approaching this transition, I recently caught up with Vishal Brown, the VP of Professional Services at Yorktel to get his perspective.

Specialty Spaces Help Employees Maximize Productivity

According to Brown, the Next-Gen Workplace is an environment that enables an agile user experience by fostering productivity, efficiency and optimal growth potential — for both employees and the business. This requires an ecosystem with flexible policies that embrace progressive business models, transparency, collaboration,community building and the consumerization of technology.

Leading businesses are now leveraging Next Generation Workspace design for easy collaboration, and for employees to find quiet spaces for heads-down work, says Brown.  “These spaces include areas like lounge rooms, silent rooms, phone booths, collaboration places, immersive collaboration rooms and touchdown spaces.  These varying spaces are built-for-purpose to put the Next Gen worker in a position to maximize productivity and effectiveness.”

Keep your eyes open for some upcoming articles in which we dig deeper into what this Next-Generation Workplace looks like. Topics we’re going to cover include defining the many types of collaboration and concentration spaces, the types of technology that goes into each to maximize productivity, and how business people utilize each type of space.

What about your business?  What types of specialty spaces are available to you?  Do you have the flexibility to easily work in the space that will suit your needs depending on the task at hand, or do you feel locked to your desk?  Let us know in the comments section below.

The post The Rise of Collaboration Spaces and the Next Generation Workplace appeared first on The UC Buyer.

1. Skype for Business Becomes an 800 Pound Gorilla

Last year, it was still Lync, and “what are they doing?”.  This year, it is definitely Skype for Business.  And Microsoft is flexing their muscles.  Tightly bundling their communications-layer along with productivity in Microsoft 365 provides them with an almost unfair advantage in the enterprise.  It’s not like you are going to have a conversation about UC in an a mid-sized and up organization without at least looking really hard at it.  And with Office 365 Cloud PBX, Microsoft is moving strongly into telephony and eliminating (or mitigating) the barrier many companies were concerned about, namely migrating to Enterprise Voice.

I’m expecting to not only hear attendees talking about it, but I’m guessing there will be a bunch of exhibitors who have S4B as a major part of their story.  They may have built upon it, integrated with it or put WebRTC layers on top of it, but they will definitely be talking about it.

2. WebRTC Gains Traction

Last year I predicted that there would be WebRTC proof-of-concepts and some applications, but not many mission critical ones.  Turned out it was a bit further along than I thought with Interactive Intelligence and Unify both showing pretty robust UC solutions built upon WebRTC.  This year, I’m looking forward to see if the contact center solutions are offering WebRTC solutions for direct interactions between agents and customers and what some use cases might be.  There are also a number of WebRTC development solutions, like Sonus, Genband and Twilio, and I’m guessing those platforms will be getting some serious grip.

3. Huddle Rooms, Huddle Rooms Everywhere You Look

This time last year, I hadn’t heard the term huddle room, now you can’t get away from it…and that is a good thing.  With the rapid trend towards open office floorplans, employees need spaces to collaborate, and they need a bunch of them.  Huddle rooms – smaller conference rooms designed for collaboration – are they answer, but they work best when they have UC technology in place.  As we reported earlier, the race is on to outfit the huddle room so employees can easily collaborate with remote customers, partners and colleagues and do so in a professional, high quality  manner.  Companies like Jabra, Microsoft (hoping I finally get to see a Surface Hub), Google, Polycom and others are already delivering solutions to the market, and I’m expecting to see a bunch more companies focused on this growing, um, space.

4. The Rise of the Remote Worker

We really need some new studies about how fast the telework force is growing in America because it seems to me that it is EXPLODING and that the data doesn’t match up.  And with so many people working from home or at the very least from the road, I’m expecting to hear a lot of buzz about how to take care of these employees and make sure they are a seamless part of the team and as productive as possible. It’s likely we’ll see some interesting technologies focused on streamlining home-based collaboration with professional-grade devices and solutions like those from Prysm and others.

Continued Buzz About Consolidation

Last year there was a consistent murmur at the event about how many competitors there were in the Hosted VoIP and UCaaS space and that the industry was ripe for consolidation.  I think there will be a lot more of that this year as the M&A market in UC has not been as active as it might have been.  The customer land grab is on and if you are at this event and doing a good job of selling, you’re probably doing a good job of growing your company and increasing your valuation, and maybe you’re not too quick to move.  Still, I gotta think there are some bigger players that are looking to grow through acquisition and that there will be a bunch of speculation about who is going to buy or merge with whom.

What about you?  What are you expecting to see in Orlando next week.  Let me know in the comments section, or if you are going to be down there and want to connect, use the contact form down in the footer to get in touch.

The post 5 Things I’m Expecting to See at Enterprise Connect appeared first on The UC Buyer.

To take a closer look at some of the advantages and potential hurdles to the open-office trend, I recently did a podcast with Mitch Friend, North American President of Plenom Office Intelligence. Plenom is the maker of the Jabra Busylight and other devices designed to help businesses work more efficiently and productively within the context of their unified communications infrastructure. Mitch had some insights to share with me, as well as some thoughts on what the future of shared and open office spaces may look like in the future.

Business Drivers of the Shift toward Open Office

According to Mitch, the real driving force behind this move to a smaller and more open floorplan is due to two basic factors. The first is probably an obvious one – the cost savings associated with a smaller real estate footprint, and the utility cost savings that goes along with that. This is an immediate benefit to an organization, and flows directly to the bottom line. The second driver may also be somewhat apparent to many of us. It’s the collaboration that can take place organically when employees aren’t ensconced in an office or in high-walled cubicles, but are out in the open where team members can see and interact with them.

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Dig Deeper:  Download “Why Your UC Deployment Will Fail – And 3 Ways to Save It”
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Companies also gain an advantage by shifting resources and creating dynamic teams as business needs dictate. Some of those needs may be project-based, they may depend on meeting certain business cycle demands, or they may be based on dynamics specific to a certain business function. An open-plan office allows for the creation of impromptu meetings to quickly resolve certain issues, and it can lead to more knowledge-sharing and a better trained workforce.

The Challenges of an Open Plan Office

Of course, Mitch also reminded me that the shift to an open office and to dynamic collaboration brings additional challenges. The conditions that make an open office space such a creative and idea-sharing environment can also make it potentially chaotic and disruptive. Imagine an employee with a deadline and who is settling into a productive flow, when a sudden “impromptu meeting” presents itself. Flow is disrupted, and individual creative process comes to an abrupt halt. This is one of the downside risks to the open plan office setting, and it presents both design and technical challenges to overcome.

Business Considerations when Creating an Open Office Environment

Part of what makes an open office environment work well is the planning that goes into creating the space itself. Special consideration needs to be paid to designing what are called concentration zones, along with huddle rooms and enclosed meeting spaces. These breakout spaces offer a buffer zone, and allow for meetings and collaboration to take place with less disruption to the entire office.

“Providing a combination of busy areas for collaboration and more quiet areas for concentration and individual creativity is a part of the flexibility that makes open office settings work,” says Mitch.

Technologies that are Helping Open Offices Succeed

Along with the design considerations are the technology tools that assist workers in making the most of an open setting. The Kuando Busylight product made by Mitch’s company Plenom, helps to resolve some of the challenges of open offices by providing real-time status of an employee’s availability for anyone to see.

“With the increased use of headsets, especially with unified communications where the computer has become your phone, we’re facing an interruption explosion,” said Mitch.

In conjunction with a unified communications platform, Busylight let’s workers maintain their personal space and avoid unwanted interruptions. A combination of both hardware and software, Busylight brings presence management and presence status to the real world for managing the personal productivity process and workflow.

The Future of Open Office Spaces

Finally, I asked Mitch to speculate on the future of open office plans, and whether he thinks the trend toward smaller and more flexible work spaces will continue.

“I think the cost savings alone of these smaller and more flexible spaces means that they will continue to thrive. Not only that, but the way today’s millennial workforce prefers to work is in this type of a setting – it’s how they are most comfortable.”

Mitch went on to say, “As today’s workforce transitions into management roles, the work environment will likely continue to trend that way.”

The post Open Offices: The Trends, Benefits and Challenges Faced in Creating Flexible Work Spaces appeared first on The UC Buyer.

In the 2015 survey, 43% of respondents rate their UC deployment as successful or very successful, down from 60.5% in the 2014 survey. Nearly a quarter (24%) said their rollout was downright unsuccessful.

“People are struggling to quantify the value of their investments,” Lazar told me. “They spend a lot to roll out all these applications but they’re not able to measure any kind of tangible benefit.”

What Namertes found was that businesses are not measuring the correct attributes if you want to find out how beneficial a UC solution is to those who use it.  Metrics like project completion times, customer satisfaction levels and utilization rates among individual users provides more clarity into whether a UC platform is adding value to the enterprise than traditional IT metrics like overall usage or application performance.  To insure your unified communications investment pays off and the technology is adopted and integrated into corporate culture, here are some things to take into consideration.

Communicate with End Users – Match Tools to Individual Employee Requirements

Involving end users ahead of time and making them part of the process can go a long way in increasing acceptance and usage.  For example, some tools in the UC arsenal aren’t necessary for certain users.  Ask yourself it the accounting team really needs desktop video conferencing capabilities, or is that an example of delivering a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist.  Often, providing unnecessarily technology reduces adoption rates and increases perceived complexity.

Aligning UC requirements to individual employees and their job functions requires up front and ongoing interaction with end users. For companies looking to expand UC rollouts a great place to start is by mapping functions to various employee roles and providing specific role-based training – you’ll likely see satisfaction and use rates go up.

Designing Workspaces for Collaboration Can Improve UC Adoption

The adoption of UC is happening in conjunction with a few other mega trends, namely the spike in mobile and remote workers, a reduction in the square footage allocated to each employee and a shift towards open office floorplans to pack more employees into a smaller space.  These changes can be a lot for employees to adapt to and can have a profound impact on corporate culture.  While unified communications technology is meant to enhance collaboration and shrink the distance between remote colleagues and customers, the physical impact of smaller, noisier offices can have an impact on worker’s ability to concentrate and collaborate with colleagues while in the office.

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Dig Deeper:  Download the Whitepaper – Why Your UC Deployment will Fail (and 3 Ways to Save It)

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One way businesses are addressing this is by increasing the number of small collaboration or conference spaces (much needed when private offices or even cubicles are on the decline and employees are sharing loud, open bullpen spaces).  These so called Huddle rooms are expected to grow from an afterthought in most offices to nearly 50 million spaces by 2050. Outfitting these smaller conference rooms with UC solutions – voice and video – can allow local teams to rapidly collaborate with remote team members and have a meaningful impact not only on face-to-face productivity, but also on UC adoption.  

Supporting Remote Workers Increases Productivity, Makes Them Feel Part of the Team

According to Global Workplace Analytics, since 2005 the number of employees that work multiple days per week from their home has grown 80% to over 3.3 million, or about 2.6% of the total U.S. workforce. Now granted, I work in the tech industry, but my personal perspective is teleworkers represent WAY more than 2.6% of the workforce.  For these employees, Unified Communications is their lifeline to the office, their colleagues and the ability to collaborate and communicate effectively and professionally.

Making sure these workers are outfitted so they have a consistent professional experience is important to a successful UC deployment.  Providing high end UC headsets for hands-free communication, or desktop speakerphones can make all the difference when it comes to adoption, productivity and call quality both in the home office and while on the road.

Endpoints Can Make or Break the Experience

When it comes to UC adoption, a recurring theme has been the importance of transitioning to headsets as the audio endpoint of choice, with multiple case studies pointing out the importance of the shift, and Frost & Sullivan even releasing a report stating that headsets increase the ROI of UC and collaboration tools.   As the component of a UC solution that physically touches the end user, having a high quality headset has been proven to increase adoption rates, especially with enhanced features.

While preferred headset types vary by user and role, in open office spaces employees are increasingly looking towards headsets that help them block out noise and interruptions.  These headsets, like the Jabra Evolve series, create personal “concentration zones” by lighting up to notify colleagues when you are busy and don’t want to be disturbed, cutting out background noise with active and passive noise cancelling technology and delivering the capacity to quickly switch between listening to music and taking a phone call on your deskphone, smartphone or softphone.   

What types of actions is your business taking to increase UC adoption rates? Let us know in the comment section below.

The post Increasing Adoption: Giving Your UC Deployment A Fighting Chance appeared first on The UC Buyer.

As you may have noticed, we have been talking a lot lately at the UC Buyer about how the rapid shift towards UC and mobility has led to a spike in the number of remote workers, which has in turn led to a trend towards smaller offices with open office floor plans. All of these open office spaces have also led to another trend – a rise in the number of collaboration or conference spaces in these offices (much needed when private offices or even cubicles are on the decline and employees are sharing noisy, open bullpen spaces).  According to recent reports, there are over 55 million meeting or conference rooms worldwide, of which 24 million, or 40%, are medium sized conference rooms.  

While the medium sized conference room market is growing at a brisk pace due to these trends, it has nothing on so called “Huddle rooms”, which are smaller, dedicated collaboration rooms allowing employees quick access to conference space whenever they need one in order to meet with local or remote teammates, partners or customers.   Huddle rooms, a term I’d never heard of until a couple of years ago, are expected to grow from an afterthought in many offices to nearly 50 million spaces globally by 2050.  That’s a number that makes you sit up and take notice, and serious players are doing just that while looking to deliver solutions for outfitting them.

Delivering Powerful, Affordable, Voice and Video Collaboration in Small Conference Spaces

Some huddle rooms are just empty offices with a table, chairs and a whiteboard and I’ve seen more and more of those as I visit with companies around the country.  However, with a third of knowledge workers now working outside the office, the need to work effectively with internal and external teams means that it makes good business sense to outfit huddle rooms with the necessary voice, video and UC solutions to enable remote collaboration – preferably without the $50,000+ pricetag of setting up a large conference room with traditional telepresence solutions.   

Google is one company working to deliver just that with their Chromebox solution.  As my colleague Paul Desmond stated in an earlier post:

Chromebox takes a slimmed-down approach. You get a camera, one or two microphone/speaker devices (depending on model), a remote control and the Chromebox hardware box, which is based on a 4th generation Intel Core i7 processor.

It all integrates with Google Hangouts, which supports videoconferences with up to 15 participants. And it comes with management and support for a $250 annual fee, with the first year included in the base price of $1,999.

And they’re not the only one.  Microsoft is getting in the game and looking to deliver an integrated device that pulls together many of the solutions we are all familiar with across their various business lines with their new Surface Hub.  The release date has unfortunately been pushed back to January, but as we covered earlier:

The Surface Hub is essentially an oversized Surface tablet that is intended to hang on the wall, like a big-screen TV. It has all kinds of communications and productivity tools built in, including Skype for Business (formerly Lync), OneNote whiteboard, Microsoft Office, touch and ink handwriting. It also has dual 1080p cameras to support videoconferencing via Skype for Business.

What About Bringing UC to the Huddle Room and Medium Conference Room

Many businesses are looking to take advantage of their existing UC investments and are looking for ways to utilize those in their smaller conference spaces.  It seems like it should be a snap to grab your laptop and your mobile phone, hit the conference room and have a top notch team meeting with great sound quality and video (if necessary) using the same UC solution that you use at your desk.  Of course,things are never that easy.

That’s why I found Jabra’s recent announcement about extending their critically acclaimed speakerphone line so interesting.  In a recent market survey performed by Jabra, they identified four pain points that businesses face when it comes to holding meetings:

1. Getting everyone together, including local and remote participants, is difficult
2. Meeting spaces are expensive
3. Getting meetings started is a pain (an average of 10 to 12 minutes getting a meeting going in the typical conference room setup…yeah, we’ve all been there)
4. Poor sound quality 

Their new SPEAK 810 speakerphone  is a larger version of their market leading Jabra SPEAK tabletop speakerphone and is meant to address all of these issues for huddle rooms and medium sized conference rooms  This larger speakerphone not only brings Jabra’s renowned sound quality and noise cancelling technology to bear, but is focused on enabling a collaborative mode of working, especially for companies that have already made a UC investment.  The SPEAK 810 doesn’t rely on phone lines (or even ethernet for that matter) so it allows companies to turn a huddle room into a fully functional conferencing space without buildout.  Just connect your laptop via USB, or your smartphone or tablet via bluetooth and you’re connected in 7 seconds to a speakerphone with premium sound quality that can support up to 15 people in the room.  Employees can use the UC solution they are trained on and comfortable with to make calls, or use web / video conferencing to pull in remote team members, partners or customers.  It even allows users to charge any mobile device eliminating the worry of battery life during the call.  At $599 retail, it is also a lot less expensive than traditional conference room speakerphones.

The trends towards UC, mobility, remote working and open office spaces are only accelerating.  This is where work is headed.  It is great to see solutions showing up in the market that are making it easier for businesses to outfit conference rooms and huddle rooms more quickly and affordably while enabling the type of collaboration that increases productivity.  

The post The Race is On to Outfit the Huddle Room with Voice, Video and UC for Serious Collaboration appeared first on The UC Buyer.

Over the last several years as I travel around the country to meet with companies, customers and colleagues, I have been bearing witness to the rapid shift in office spaces towards so-called open offices.  These spaces are a far cry from the corner office dominated, cubicle farm based, big boardroom offices we all grew up with and envision when we think of corporate America.  With teleworking on the rise, employees working flex hours and businesses looking to increase team collaboration, the walls have literally come down.  Businesses are decreasing the amount of space they lease, opening up the floor plans to increase team interaction and deploying unified communications solutions to streamline team and customer communications.

As this infographic lays out, businesses are on an unstoppable trend towards open office spaces and it makes good business sense -it saves them a LOT of money.  For example:

• Companies are leasing 33% less space per employee than they did just a decade ago
• Businesses have increased space utilization from 50% to 80-95%
• Organizations are now packing 7 workers in per 1000 sqft as opposed to 5 workers in just 2009

Recently I was meeting with some executives at Jabra in their new North American headquarters and received a guided tour of their brand new, state-of-the-art open office.  The thought that went into the space and the changes the new environment has helped facilitate in their business processes provided me with a new appreciation for how open offices can impact corporate culture and what businesses need to do to ensure open offices deliver on the promise of increased collaboration and efficiency.

Open Offices Require Careful Planning, Plenty of Collaboration and Specialty Spaces

According to Stefan Slattery, the Marketing Program Manager at Jabra, management was intimately involved in designing the new office.  “The overarching theme was always open office, but our facility manager interviewed and gathered details from the department heads to determine how each team needed to work and what approach would help them be the most effective,” says Slattery.  “For example, the marketing team went with an open bullpen area allowing easy access to colleagues for collaboration and rapid fire discussions.  The sales team wanted to afford a level of privacy for phone calls, but also allow for streamlined colleague access and collaboration, so the cubicle walls are shorter and they back up to each other so team members can connect more easily and see who is available for discussion.”

The other vital aspect of the open office that Jabra designed was ensuring there are plenty of private collaboration and conferencing spaces as well as specialty rooms to make sure the space performed for the employees.  According to Slattery, these rooms included:

Huddle Rooms – They have three glass-fronted rooms with whiteboard walls that groups can quickly go into to collaborate on a particular project.  By using glass the spaces are visible and teams can tell if they are available at a glance.

Silent Rooms – These rooms have their own doors and deliver privacy for employees that are looking to have a private conversation  or execute on heads down work

Relaxation Spaces – These rooms have comfortable couches and chairs that employees can use to take a break, or do some work on their laptops with their feet kicked up.

Lync Video Conferencing Rooms – These two video collaboration rooms are fully integrated with their MS Lync UC solution, with huge video monitors showing upcoming meetings with one-click launch.  Schedule a meeting at your desk for one of these rooms, walk in at the correct time with your team and click ‘Go’.  Watch everyone else appear on the monitor as they join.  Sounds pretty sweet.

Conference Rooms with Full AV Hookups – Another 4 or 5 conferencing rooms with full AV hookups are scattered throughout the office to ensure there is never a lack of available conference space and that local teams can connect with remote colleagues or customers whenever necessary.

“These rooms are what really make the new space shine,” says Slattery.  “You never feel like there is a lack of privacy if you need it, or team collaboration space when you want it.  This makes a big difference, especially in such an open environment.”

Concentration and Productivity in Open Office Spaces

One area that it is clear open office spaces excel in is increased face-to-face collaboration among team members.  “From the marketing team’s perspective we are noticing major improvements in collaboration and the ability to more easily meet with colleagues and pull remote team members into a conversation.  This is especially true with the increased number of video collaboration rooms, not to mention desktop video at every workstation” says Slattery.  One interesting point is that the huddle rooms are quickly becoming a favorite locale for sidebar conversations and impromptu brainstorming sessions.  The additional flex spaces allow for team members to address some of the perceived downsides of open offices, namely they are noisier and employees can feel a lack of privacy.

In such open spaces, another area of concern I have heard from employees is concentration.  How do you execute on that heads down, critical project when you are right in the middle of all your coworkers?  Having the chance to discuss this with Jabra was ideal, as they are committed to eating their own dogfood when it comes to open office collaboration, leveraging unified communications and utilizing their own devices to enhance privacy.  “When it comes to creating a personal concentration zone, you are responsible for carving out your own space and dependence on your devices and peripherals is critical,” says Slattery.  “The first thing I do is change the presence status on my UC solution to ‘Do Not Disturb’ to cut down on non-critical IM’s and phone calls.  Then I turn on my busylight so my colleagues know not to tap me on my shoulder.  Then I put on my noise cancelling headset, switch it from connecting to my phone to connecting with my music so I can get down to business.”  

I had never heard of a busylight before, but it is a desktop peripheral that connects to your phone and a red light shines to let people know you are on a phone call.  You can also manually turn it on to let people know you are concentrating.  A simple idea, but it makes a lot of sense in an open office.  Having a noise cancelling headset like the Jabra Evolve can make it seem like you are alone in the office by eliminating virtually all background noise.

Getting this tour gave me a new appreciation for how a well-planned, well-executed open office space can deliver results.  Design for each team’s unique needs, commit to unified communications, have plenty of collaboration spaces and make sure each team member has the right devices to allow for privacy and execution.  Seems like a pretty simple recipe.

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Chromebox for meetings takes a different tack at more or less the same thing that Surface Hub is targeting. Rather than an all-in-one solution, Chromebox takes a slimmed-down approach. You get a camera, one or two microphone/speaker devices (depending on model), a remote control and the Chromebox hardware box, which is based on a 4th generation Intel Core i7 processor.

It all integrates with Google Hangouts, which supports videoconferences with up to 15 participants. And it comes with management and support for a $250 annual fee, with the first year included in the base price.

Comparing Chromebox for Meetings and Surface Hub

That price tag starts at $999 for the small room bundle, with one mic/speaker – suitable for up to 8 people. This week Google announced a larger version with a pan-tilt-zoom camera, a second mic/speaker and dual screen support, so you can connect two monitors and the extra speakerphone (which sure looks like a Jabra Speak). It’s suitable for rooms with up to 20 people and starts at $1,999. (The exact price depends on which model you choose, from either Asus or Dell.)  You have to add your own monitor to complete the solution.

The lower-end, 55-inch Surface Hub, on the other hand, goes for $6,999. Chromebox is clearly focusing on creating an affordable video meeting room solution, and not a giant tablet, touchscreen experience, but to to make it a fair comparison you’d have to add a monitor. If you wanted to run your meetings on a touch screen monitor, I turned up this 55-inch touch model for $3,279. That brings the tab for the larger Chromebox setup to $5,278.  If doesn’t look like there are advance touchscreen features like using the monitor as a whiteboard with Chromebox, so it’s up to you whether the big touch screen monitor is worth it.  Without it, you could save some serious coin.

The point is, either way you go we are now seeing room-based conference room systems for a fraction of the price that you’d historically pay for a traditional videoconferencing system.

Do You Really Need Chromebox for Meetings?

The next question is, if you’re using Google Hangouts, do you really need Chromebox for meetings?  Can’t you just hook up any computer to a big monitor, attach some microphones, a Jabra mini speakerphone, a camera and have at it?  

Sure, I see no reason you couldn’t do that. But a commenter to a post about the Chromebox on the Official Google for Work Blog site fairly nailed the argument for the Chromebox:

The hardest part of any A/V solution is not just assembling the right blend of components that perform at a level of fidelity required. The greatest challenge is finding the hardware that plays nice together 100% of the time. As someone who has supported multiple integrated solutions in large conference rooms for a fortune 500, it is surprisingly disappointing how often small anomalies manifest. USB PTZ suddenly has choppy frame rates. Low and behold, when you research the issue you then discover that your one specific model of PTZ doesn’t work in Wisconsin during Spring when the wind blows from the South. The value of a pre-assembled kit can be very appealing.

And when the price tag is at most $1,999, and you’d probably spend about half that on a decent computer to run the software anyway, it doesn’t seem like a bad deal at all, especially with the rapid adoption of huddle rooms and huddle spaces.  Let me know in the comments below if you agree or think I’m all wet.

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