Modern Huddle rooms are shaping the Corporate Work Culture

Workplaces have gone through numerous changes since the advent of Internet globally over the past 25 years. The way we work and the work culture of different organizations has changed drastically. Corporations are continuously adapting to the new workplace strategies to drive corporate growth. Companies are trying to provide its employees with ease and flexible working conditions to get the best out of them. Workplaces are now equipped with ubiquitous Internet access, cloud-based applications, modern huddle room technologies for brainstorming and remote working facilities in order to increase productivity of their employees. Workers are also provided with the freedom of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) in order to offer employees full choice and control over their share of work.

A workplace transformation is the rethinking of flexible workspaces to accommodate different kinds of work, workers, and technology. Work places have witnessed a historic change on how people work and collaborate in the modern work environment. Technology has transcended to enable virtual collaboration easily available for everyone. Employees around the world are no longer satisfied with audio conferencing to interact with their virtual peers. The physical workplaces are also moving towards accommodating the mobile workforce through open office layouts while making huddle rooms available to catalyze spontaneous, ad hoc and private collaborations.

According to the research, an average respondent attends little over than 9 meetings in a week. The high value of collaboration involves a mix of both in-person and virtual attendees. In this, approximately 54% of the meetings include remote participants that are connected to the meeting via audio/video or web conferencing. In the same meetings, the elite or the power meters’ participation in a virtual meeting is as high as 80%.

It has been observed that a confluence of trends is driving a new interest in huddle rooms through video collaborations. Workplace relations are highly influenced by virtual meetings nowadays. Meetings that were earlier supposed to be long one-hour sessions are increasingly becoming ad hoc productive sessions. Virtual collaborations have provided the workers with the platform to work with agility and better alignment with the team or senior leaderships of the companies. Instead of waiting to bring up an idea till the next weekly/monthly meeting, brainstorming sessions are quickly organized within the team from their respective places. No doubt, ‘Work from Anywhere’ culture with availability of modern video collaboration has bitten the corporate culture these days.

A robust rise in number of remote workers and remote meeting participants has prompted businesses to optimize their office real-estate with comparatively smaller huddle rooms than large conference rooms. Apart from real-estate, collaboration technologies are witnessing significant evolution. Availability of collaborative softwares that are paired with cloud and AI add to the convenience and flexibility for the users that are looking for spaces where they can start instant Video collaboration sessions. Video collaboration providers have enabled technologies like portable video conferencing devices that provide high-quality video and audio and can also enable in-room screen sharing from laptop or a mobile device.

The landscape of today’s enterprise collaboration is changing rapidly and most companies have begun adopting digital tools and video collaboration technologies in their huddle rooms to transform their businesses. This new work environment that is driven by collaborative technologies, is completely employee friendly and is embraced by work-life harmony that today’s millennial seek at work. 

Sumanta Datta
Managing Director and Cluster Head, India and South West Asia, Logitech