The Future of the Workplace after Covid-19: Meeting Spaces

After nearly a year of social distancing and the UK in their third lockdown, businesses are looking at how to utilise their workplace while keeping staff safe when lockdown eases. 

With the pandemic removing the ability to be in close proximity with each other, and with social distancing suggested to remain in place for the foreseeable future the workplace will have to adapt.

While offices may look differently, business activities will need to continue with meetings remaining an integral part – but how can companies ensure that these can be undertaken safely and effectively?

We spoke to Chris Southern, our General Sales Manager for Enterprise Solutions, about his thoughts on the future of workplace meeting spaces post Covid-19.

Here are the key points he identified:

1. Connecting staff and customers
2. Huddle Rooms
3. Touchless displays, BYOD and BYOM

1. Connecting staff and customers

In the past, meeting rooms were generally comprised of many people physically in the space with one or two joining remotely. With the current situation and new safety guidelines being enforced, that’s likely to change with only a few people able to be in the meeting room and a majority joining remotely.

High-quality video with communication tools, like Zoom and Teams, enable meetings to continue making it easier to connect colleagues and customers.

2. Huddle Rooms

While huddle rooms were previously used to bring people together in close proximity to discuss ideas, they can now be used for staff onsite to move away from their desks and connect with colleagues working from home.

Brainstorming will continue and these spaces can be utilised to help staff to spread out and connect without needing to be in the same location.

3. BYOD, BYOM and reducing touchpoints

Midwich offers leading solutions for content sharing and conferencing in meeting rooms. Bring your own device (BYOD) rooms mean presentations and meetings can be conducted without multiple users interacting with communal control hardware.

Bring your own meeting (BYOM) enables staff to seamlessly connect with the existing conferencing hardware using their own devices and gives a unified consistent experience regardless of which conferencing platform is hosting your meeting.

Touchless may be on user's minds right now but it is important not to lose sight of what your long-term collaborative working needs are. Midwich can offer systems that can meet the touch-free concerns of today but will let you unlock features and functionality as and when you feel comfortable ensuring your ROI continues to deliver beyond these difficult times.

While there is still uncertainty about when things will return to, what was once, routine – technology can help find the much-needed solution to help businesses conduct integral activities like meetings safely, now and post-pandemic.

Here at Midwich, we have a wide range of workspace technology to help staff stay connected, contact your account manager to find out more.