Meetings are an important way for people to come together for a common purpose. The current open office environment trend is driving the increasing need for huddle rooms. This guide offers basic tips on making your huddle rooms productive, effective and inclusive.
WHAT IS A HUDDLE ROOM?
‘Huddle spaces’ or commonly termed as huddle rooms are smaller meeting spaces designed for 5 or fewer occupants. Huddle rooms are equipped with much of the technology found in a standard meeting room, but often at a fraction of the price. Thus making them the perfect meeting spot for small groups. According to Frost & Sullivan, huddle room meetings are predicted to represent almost 70 percent of all video conferencing meetings by 2022. Also, studies show that the big conference rooms are underutilized since most of the meetings have 4-6 participant but they end up using big conference rooms due to lack of huddle rooms!
BENEFITS
Before diving into planning a huddle space, it is important to first understand the value huddle rooms bring to an organization.
1. The top benefit is the ability to have a quick impromptu or scheduled meeting for spontaneous collaboration.
2. Huddle rooms provide privacy, especially for sensitive information, and also as a way to facilitate brainstorming.
3. Video conferencing ability facilitates efficient meetings with geographically dispersed participants.
4. Huddle rooms equipped with digital whiteboards offer the ability to save written work, resume a previous whiteboarding session and easily share with others.
5. In open spaces, huddle rooms give the courtesy to colleagues of moving discussions and noise away from those working.
6. Huddle rooms are less expensive to equip than a large conference room
Increased productivity and effective information sharing are the added benefits to the aforementioned points.
WHAT DO YOU NEED IN A HUDDLE ROOM?
Huddle rooms require the right technology to drive up their functionality and utilization.
Typically, huddle rooms must be equipped with the following basic staples –
1. BYOD presentation – Anyone in the huddle room should be able to seamlessly present their screen on the room display without any hassle.
2. Video Conferencing abilities – Simple conferencing camera with a mic array and VC solution like Zoapi can enable your users to have video conferencing from the huddle room. Huddle room also frees up your big conference rooms when one or two people need to join a remote team over video calls.
3. A digital whiteboard – Digital whiteboard improves the collaboration efficiency of the team. Interactive TVs are becoming affordable and it avoids all the messy whiteboard and marker pens. With Digital whiteboard, you can annotate on the wirelessly presented screen or use it as a whiteboard. And the ability to take snapshots and preserve your discussion drawing is a huge value add.
4. A Room Scheduler – A room scheduler outside the huddle room can improve the utilization of the room by making every Adhoc meeting into a scheduled meeting.
The technology in the huddle room must be easy to use, consistent and reliable so that users can focus on the subject of the meeting, and not the technology enabling it.
MANAGING HUDDLE ROOMS
Using the right technology in each meeting space will eliminate many of the top challenges for the IT team. Thus removing the support calls to IT on a daily, if not weekly, basis.
With Zoapi dashboard, IT admins and infrastructure managers have visibility into the use and performance metrics of every meeting space. Thus enabling them to proactively optimize huddle room solutions for the needs of their users.
The use of huddle spaces is growing and is expected to accelerate as they deliver significant value to users and organizations. Zoapi allows users to derive maximum productivity consistently and not waste time and resources looking for technology support.
Experience Zoapi’s collaboration technology by scheduling a demo today!
Try Zoapi Hub https://zoapi.com/zoapi-hub-hardware/
Know how Zoapi can help you upgrade your meeting rooms https://zoapi.com/zoapi-hub-features/
Watch Zoapi quick product intro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndDGDioTXow
