This article was written by Duncan Peberdy, T1V's Territory Manager for Europe.
Working cultures haven’t evolved sufficiently to fully acknowledge or embrace the choices that employees and students want NOW for greater flexibility in how and where they work. For the most part, our visions, of what is already possible, are obscured by vendors duping us that the technology tools we already have are all that we need, even though they were developed for communication and not participation, not collaboration.
Collaboration needs great communication, but communication on its own doesn’t deliver collaboration, let alone active engagement and immersive workflows. As a result, those ineffective ‘collaboration’ tools when deployed as the answer in businesses and universities, that haven’t yet figured out how they are going to effectively satisfy the demands for new ways of working, are more likely to hold those businesses back instead of igniting opportunities that ultimately increase shareholder value or improve student learning outcomes.
The alternative to video meeting tools that don’t nurture conversations — that don’t allow me to simultaneously show my content alongside yours — that create a fatigue, burnout even, from passive viewing that would be massively diminished by active engagement, isn’t to follow the likes of Elon Musk and retreat to how things were. The answer, that will motivate existing staff, attract the best future talent, and reduce the risk of becoming irrelevant to customers, is to embrace the opportunities by investing in technology that will improve your commercial outputs. The demand for hybrid working and learning is only going to grow, so if you haven’t figured out your strategies for ensuring success yet, strategies that must embrace outputs and not presenteeism, then now is the time to do so.
In the short-term Elon Musk might get all his staff back working full time in the office, but further out his business [and reputation] will suffer as resignations demonstrate the new culture of how and where his employees want to work, and top talent will cease to be attracted by such inflexibility.
Now that COVID-19 restrictions are all but removed, there will be plenty like Musk who are tempted to see a return to how things once were. But once-upon-a-time is no longer the only story in town; there is no need to commute into town simply to undertake calls or for concentrated work that we used to see so many people undertaking alone in meeting rooms and huddle spaces. During COVID-19 lockdowns so many people invested to develop home offices with better screens, microphones, and cameras to make them more efficient, more professional, with desks and chairs and decorations that can sustain productivity far beyond the occasional half-day or evening when we used to work from home. We are not working from home any longer, instead we are at home and working better than we used to in the office, and without the time consuming, energy zapping inflexibility of a crowded commute.
We will all still need to come to the office, it’s essential for building relationships, for our mental health, and for the types of work that flourish when we are together in a state of flow working collaboratively. It just doesn’t need to be all of the time, and now, more than ever, homogenised meeting rooms need repurposing into spaces where working in person together can thrive as both in-room activities and with colleagues and partners joining remotely. It's only technology that can facilitate hybrid working, and it must be so much more effective than just video communication.
Many companies are in uncharted waters when it comes to adopting new technology, embracing new working cultures, and recognising the upsides to their business outputs that these will deliver. No one wants to fail, but failure is a great learning curve, failure in the right culture can make us stronger, and yet without the vision of a moment of truth, the relative safety of the known video technology with its [mostly unrecognised] limitations reinforce ‘make-do’ attitudes instead of seeking excellence.
What should a moment of truth about technology that drives hybrid working forward look like to you? How many of these do you need on your checklist?
- Supports all the software tools you already have.
- Provides a common platform in innovation spaces, briefing centres and presentation spaces, meeting rooms, and for remote working, joining any of them seamlessly together, even when video walls, large touch screens, and laptops are being used in different places.
- Advanced Content Sharing - Multiple people in multiple places can simultaneously share content at the same time, and anyone can reorganise content, add notes and annotations, and be fully immersed as an active participant, even when working remotely.
- Remote participants have the same equity of participation as their in-room collaborators.
- Effortlessly capture ideas instantly that can incorporate visual notes and thought trails, making it easier to build ideas whilst maintaining their development path.
- Meeting Persistence - everything is digitally captured for sharing or to re-open and develop further.
- ThinkHub Dock - additional screens can be used to permanently display any chosen content; the agenda, the video participants, etc., keeping your working canvas free for work!
- What if you could deliver your PowerPoint slides in any order, or even show two or three of them at the same time, so your pitch or presentation can flow with the conversation instead of keeping to the rigid linear order you predetermined, and better explain complex data and research.
- ThinkHub Groups - create groups of information containing notes, drawing, images, PDFs, videos, websites.
- Agile working with Sticky Notes that anyone anywhere can contribute ideas to anonymously or otherwise.
When we take away the limitations of idea creation and remove the ‘only one person can share content at a time’ from our many different meetings, such as agile, scrums, sprints, and reflections — we can achieve states of flow that accelerate the innovation of new products and services from heightened levels of engagement and ownership. When people can contribute we physically see them lean in and engage, when they can only view and listen, they lean back and become passive.
I have a confession.
These ways of working are not a future wish-list, they are achievable today with ThinkHub from T1V.
ThinkHub is the perfect non-proprietary resource for developing hybrid strategies, to put at the heart of your new office spaces that will make people want to come back to the office and be together driving projects forwards. The perfect tool for bringing multi-located teams together for real time development of ideas that they have at their fingertips in all locations.
How long should you invest to discover your moment of truth and understand how ThinkHub brings visual clarity to complex product development and many more situations that benefit from being able to see a range of information in the same single visual panorama?
Well, here’s a 58 second YouTube video to start with.
If you now think that ThinkHub has the potential to help your business evolve its hybrid capabilities, then that must be worth investing less than an hour of your time to meaningfully investigate further. Maybe your moment of truth will just be recognizing that generational change is going to accelerate hybrid working anyway, and that it’s essential to start creating new office spaces that will work better for your people and your shareholders?
There will be more trying times ahead.
Should a future pandemic enforce lockdowns, or climate change and high energy costs finally make us re-evaluate travel, ThinkHub will make your business more resilient. And with ThinkHub Cloud, our latest addition to the T1V portfolio, the same benefits to maximising business outputs can be achieved without being in the office at all.
Enabling innovation spaces, where new and unexplored ideas can be developed, to link with any other meeting space or remote colleague where everyone is active, might be your moment of truth? Or perhaps it will be a realisation that the flexibility and visual power of ThinkHub without any rigid software constraints will allow you to start designing workflows where contextual content will deepen your innovation potential? In a competitive world, constant innovation, adaptability, and the drive for customer satisfaction are essential for resilience and growth.
These things being technically possible is only half the new story for hybrid working, the key is creating engaging shared experiences irrespective of location.
If you want your colleagues to lean in and engage with hybrid working, contact me to arrange an online demo of ThinkHub with our T1V Experience Centre that you and those colleagues can participate in, wherever you are, and see ThinkHub working in several different office environments. Before the demo finishes, you’ll be envisioning the art of the possible that you never knew existed.
Check out t1v.com to discover more about ThinkHub, or to contact me directly:
Duncan Peberdy
dpeberdy@t1v.com
+44 [0] 7887 628 567