This article was written by Duncan Peberdy, T1V's Territory Manager for Europe.
We are in a moment of change. We’ve had these moments before, but this one is very different
For most of the last two years — where we’ve worked, how we’ve worked, and who we’ve worked with — have been determined by the necessity of government directives to protect populations, and not in purposely designed office spaces. Remote working was not new for everyone, and there is always work best completed within the solitude of isolation. But being socially together in offices, having robust interchanges of ideas when we meet to share information or create solutions, are the types of interactions that we’ve struggled to replicate over distance. Social interaction, that builds trust, allows for spontaneity and provides us with a holistic viewpoint that we can’t get from just our laptop screen in a home office, helps us to create deeper connections between those present, and to dive deeper into innovative ideas for problem solving or creating new goods and services.
Our ‘moment of change’ might also be described as a tension between corporations, who largely want to return to how things were, and their employees who, having been part of an impromptu experiment in how we work, have valued not having to commute five days each week, and are questioning the necessity to do so moving forward. America’s ‘great resignation’ in 2021, when almost 50 million people voluntarily quit their jobs, clearly signposts that going back to how things were — the one-size-fits-all of 100% in-office working, is unthinkable. And whether it’s the next COVID, another Putin-esque disaster, or climate change, this new flexibility uncovered by remote working, the improved work-life balance [that we’ve paid lip-service but realistically kept at arm's-length for decades], along with mental health benefits, has the potential to increase productivity too. It’s also an inconvenient truth that many organisations haven’t yet figured out where hybrid sits in their strategies, and how many more resignations and the resulting exodus of talent are required before they take ownership.
Innovation spaces, collaboration rooms, and customer experience centres are purposely designed to maximise their effectiveness with furniture and technology that are not present in huddle rooms or our home offices. Consequently, workflows fall down when we want to connect people in those different spaces to work together, as will increasingly be the case. And so the fallback is to use the tools that everyone has, most commonly Microsoft Teams or Zoom, which are really great for connecting people, but not for underpinning effective visual collaboration between hybrid teams.
Both individuals and corporations would thrive if we could actually achieve those same in-person benefits when not everyone is in the same room together. That would be a game changer. It would not only allow us to be highly effective in an increasingly hybrid world that is clearly here to stay, but it would provide businesses with the real opportunity, a commercial advantage, to react more quickly when situations that demand such agility arise. Forget about the visible savings of airfares, hotel bills, and corporate dining, and concentrate instead on the business advantage of being able to effectively hold such human interactions between people in different places at the same time NOW, instead of the days waiting to bring people physically together.
We know that only technology can enable such advantages for hybrid working, and we might be wondering how long it will be before an effective collaboration platform that can simultaneously support multiple pieces of content, from multiple participants, in multiple locations, and give everyone the same equality of participation in different working environments, is commercially available?
Well, not only is that platform, ThinkHub by T1V, already available, many global brands that you will recognise have been using it for years to provide their teams with an equity of participation and increased social belonging when located in corporate offices that are separated geographically.
At the outset, ThinkHub’s original strength was to give in-room teams a large visual canvas that everyone could contribute content and ideas to, and for that content to be manipulated, arranged, and shared intuitively to drive project success. Multiple ThinkHubs, located anywhere in the world, can mirror their content and allow anyone, anywhere to be fully active in collaboration with colleagues, clients or suppliers. By not limiting content to just the presenter and allowing anyone anywhere to fully participate, ThinkHub provides everyone with an equity of participation and increased social belonging when located in corporate offices that are separated geographically.
It’s common for the software platforms that organisations use in their flagship collaboration and customer experience spaces to be different to the software people use in more traditional meetings spaces and on their laptops. With the upcoming release of ThinkHub Cloud, a development two years in the making, T1V has addressed the needs of remote workers to be more integral to hybrid meetings, and provided businesses with the ability to connect hybrid teams in a way not previously possible.
ThinkHub Cloud delivers the same in-room benefits to hybrid workers based away from their offices. The working canvas that in-room colleagues find so powerful for teamwork also resides in real-time on their laptop providing the same affordances of inclusive human belonging to every meeting space; collaboration spaces, meeting rooms, and remote working. It’s the missing link that solves historical problems of not-being-there when joining meetings remotely, and gives everyone social interaction, a holistic viewpoint of all the content, and parity of participation. Greater inclusion can only lead to greater work satisfaction and reduces the likelihood of talent leaving to work for organisations that better meet their new hybrid needs. Greater inclusion can only lead to greater work satisfaction and reduces the likelihood of being part of the next ‘great resignation’ statistics.
Hybrid is not only a mix of where people are located, but the option to work in the most effective location. Being in the office will still be important, just not all of the time. And when employees do go to the office, it won’t be to sit in isolated offices or booths, but to be in environments for collaboration, for delivering customer experiences, for spontaneous interactions. In fact, we will need more of these spaces purposely designed and technologically equipped so that those not present feel ever more connected to their colleagues.
Sometimes we fear change, but when change improves both our effectiveness and satisfaction at work and enables more flexibility for our personal lives, then everyone benefits, and change is a force for good.
This is what our current moment of change must achieve, and for the long term.
You only need to look at the calibre and demands of ThinkHub’s existing users to know how valuable effective collaboration is for consulting firms, financial institutions, pharmaceutical businesses, engineering companies, and more, without me labouring the point.
Check out t1v.com to discover more about ThinkHub, or to contact me directly:
Duncan Peberdy
dpeberdy@t1v.com
+44 [0] 7887 628 567