As hybrid work has become popular, companies need to make a significant change to their old work environment if they want to attract employees back to the office. One of the points is to provide flexibility to your meeting room.
LinkedIn suggests the first step is to improve boring meeting rooms. So, LinkedIn’s new flagship building in Mountain View, Calif. meeting rooms feature comfortable furniture and cutting-edge technology, and it was created by the architectural firm NBBJ, to make their office more flexible.
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What you should know
- The first requirement to improve the meeting room atmosphere is to meet the needs of your staff;
- Flexibility is very important for newly designed meeting rooms;
New design for LinkedIn’s meeting rooms
LinkedIn believes that bringing flexibility into the meeting space will make people’s work more enjoyable. If they are happier at work, the boring atmosphere would naturally go away. Therefore, compared with traditional meeting rooms, the newly designed meeting rooms with a greater focus on employees’ needs and well-being.
The new conference rooms feature movable partitions to expand or reduce meeting space at any time and provide additional sterilization equipment to protect the health of employees.
LinkedIn added open conference spaces amid the desks of engineers on the same teams. If they want to have a discussion with others, workers can pop into one of these spaces and close the sliding doors — or leave them open. Also, providing some soundproof equipment in these areas ensures workers can focus on work.
Some conference room management systems can provide a very flexible free room combination function. Colleagues can change the size and equipment of the conference room according to the needs of the meeting, so as to add more vitality to the work.
“The intention is for it (newly designed meeting room) to be hyperflexible…Acoustical baffling on the ceiling dampens sound, and its zigzag shape adds more dynamism to the room, enlivening what is normally a flat, static plane,” said Robert Norwood, a principal at NBBJ.
Relax atmosphere encourages employees to speak more
LinkedIn uses a modernist oak table from Anthropologie to replace a central table in conference spaces that look more like lounges. Also, each has a squishy sofa with throw pillows, and plants and books abound.
“The relaxed look is intended to help meeting participants feel comfortable and encourage members of the staff “who might not speak up in a traditional setting,” Lisa Britz, LinkedIn’s director of workplace design said.
Virtual meeting tools add interest to meetings
Adding virtual tools to the meeting room can connect remote workers to work together with office-fully workers and provide more energy in meetings. There have some large horizontal screens in meeting rooms on LinkedIn, allowing for sharing documents on one side and showing the faces of remote colleagues on the other.
Additionally, some companies’ conference rooms are also equipped with a digital whiteboard and a special camera mounted on an opposite wall that “ghosts out” the person writing so colleagues working at home can see what’s being written in real-time. It makes the meetings or presentations look funnier.
The real estate services firm, CBRE has conducted a survey of companies occupying office space recently. It found that 76 percent of respondents considered enhanced videoconferencing one of the top priorities in their return to the office.
Need an office management system to control flexible equipment
As mentioned above, providing flexible working equipment in the meeting room can improve the condition of work in the meeting. However, you need to be aware that to manage these devices you need a well-developed office management system.
A well-developed office management system allows you to reserve the required meeting room and ensure that your meeting is not disturbed while it is in progress.
ONES is one of the famous all-in-one smart office systems that can help you to easily implement hybrid working at ease in Indonesia. You can easily perform virtual meetings, desk hoteling, and digital office management with our Room Booking, Desk Booking, and Visitor Management features.
Contact us: hello@ones.software, or visit ONES Software official website for more information: https://ones.software/.