Are you planning for a return to the office in 2024?

The holiday break is always a good time to reflect on what took place last year and what’s in store for 2024. Flexible working and investment in platforms such as Microsoft Teams are clearly here to stay. But what about the office in 2024? When it comes to your office layout, its purpose, its function, and your workforce’s experience, what are your plans?

There’s a trend for people to move back into the office, if only part time. Increasingly, time spent at the office is in meetings with colleagues. However, 98% of meetings now include remote participants and so this ‘hybrid’ meeting experience of in-the-office and out-of-the-office is increasingly important to productivity and business outcomes.

Supporting this, organizations are refurbishing and investing in quality meeting room equipment from vendors such as Cisco, Polycom, and Logitech, who continue to push audio and video boundaries. Analytics is becoming vital to ensure everything works seamlessly together.

On a broader topic, analytics around UC, usage, occupancy, and meeting performance are helping shape our decisions on office space reconfiguration, making more room for hot desking and drop-down zones, and introducing more huddle spaces and more expansive boardroom and classroom facilities.

Creating a superior meeting room experience for everybody

Where to get started?

Many customers have invested in Microsoft Teams as their primary meeting application provider (43% – according to Metrigy) and this includes certification for meeting room hardware, offering choice from an approved range of vendors, and supporting meeting rooms of all shapes and sizes. You’ll find the link at the end of this blog!

The good news is that Cisco (working closely with Microsoft) also now has meeting room hardware certified (technically MTR certified). That means, whether it is through preference or choice, or you’re looking to get more out of existing Cisco meeting room investments, you can now bring these into your overall Teams meeting room experience with confidence. The best of both worlds!

Bringing it together with a single coherent solution

Those are the core building blocks – a collaboration platform such as Microsoft Teams, supporting a population of remote workers, with in-the-office workers joining meetings and collaborating through well-equipped meeting rooms. Simple on paper, complex in practice, where user expectations are high and IT managers are left with the disparate and basic tools provided by the vendors themselves – such as Microsoft’s Pro Portal and Cisco’s Webex Control Hub.

Larger estates particularly, with many meeting rooms, warrant an investment in suitable administration and analytics tools to deliver the right overall level of performance.

Next steps

Here are a few ideas on what should be on the checklist for such a toolset, along with a few screenshots from the VOSS toolset:

• Single pane of glass: If your UC estate is spread over several locations and office sites, containing meeting room equipment from multiple vendors and connected into the Microsoft Teams meeting service, along with many remote works, it is critical to have a single viewpoint and point of control with data insights presented in a consistent and normalized way.
• Automation with templates: There’s a need to deploy, reconfigure and often reset meeting room configurations, in a fast and standardized way, removing manual errors with automation and workflows. That might be in the rollout of a new office, or as is often the case, resetting a meeting room configuration after regular use has taken it off track and caused issues. There are a lot of configuration parameters around each meeting room type, and so templating this is critical.
• Elevating service performance: Checking in on the many components that make up the meeting room service – including Microsoft Teams, meeting room equipment, connectivity, and networking – to ensure all is performing optimally. Whether attendees are in the office or remote, everybody has a good meeting experience; whether they’re collaborating with somebody next to them or to a remote participant. Some of this will be reactive and alert-based, some will be more automated and proactive, and some will monitor actual user experience. That level of visibility then needs to provide snapshot reports and also track and trend over time, monitoring and driving improvement.

• Adoption and usage: There’s a huge amount of data generated from a UC system, and navigating through that in a timely way to really understand current performance, application usage, and how it is trending over time can be tricky – but the results are important and help align capability, capacity, and availability with business needs and budget.

• Security and compliance: With the vast amount of configuration and usage data contained in IT systems, ensuring this is configured correctly – particularly on related Microsoft Policies – and used correctly is vital. Automation helps significantly with this, and analytics provides a lens into this activity.
• Inventory and asset management: Keeping track of your UC assets across all locations is the foundation for success: What hardware is installed, which version of software is running, whether it is compliant or not. This also provides a mechanism for understanding meeting room requirements and matching equipment capabilities accordingly.
• Office and room optimization: Where there’s information available from a building management system or the meeting room equipment itself, there’s the option to track and manage room occupancy, ensuring rooms are not overfull or empty, and resources are managed accordingly. This can lead to significant cost savings in equipment, licensing, and real estate itself.

What Next?

If you’re looking for the latest release details on VOSS solutions, please click here. If you’re looking for Microsoft Teams Rooms certified systems, click here. To learn more about how VOSS can help you optimize your meeting room experience, click here. You’ll find more details at the VOSS website, or get in contact here.