How technology is creating smarter meetings

Stop your staff dreading meetings

Meetings across business locations – whether across the city or across the globe – should be a chance to collaborate and facilitate big ideas through seamless connections. But without the right technology in place, meetings can become a time sink which frustrate staff and affect your bottom line.

The right tech for better meetings

The key elements to meeting tech that works are:

• reliable conferencing
• interactive whiteboards.

Reliability is everything

There’s nothing worse than planning a meeting and having it fall down because the technology fails or no one is sure how to turn on the conferencing program. Reliability is key to your staff simply taking up the tech you provide.

The solution may be an advanced unified communication solution. The subscription based service works with any standard video conferencing system to enable you to create, join and manage meetings from any device.

You collaborate with more people in more places and spend less time on the phone with IT support. And it’s not just about seeing reactions in real time for more engaging meetings – you can share your documents on the screen and collaborate right now instead of clogging up emails and getting confused over version control.

User experience and the right tech

The usability of the meeting technology is just as important as the tech itself.

The below are essential to a positive user experience:

• easy to use
• high quality video
• available instantly without scheduling
• self-service with no data restrictions.

Tech specs to look for:

• quality global MPLS video network
• great coverage backed by global data centres
• dedicated video network so all calls have the quality of a local call
• scalability
• security and encryption features
• use existing solutions and connect through different platforms.

Take your staff with you

Having conferencing facilities isn’t a magic bullet to productivity and profit – your team needs to know how to use it and to rely on it working. Choose a reliable solution that has user experience at its heart so that staff experience the true benefits.

Ricoh tip: Don’t sign up to any conferencing solutions without understanding the training and support you’ll get from your IT partner.

Smart collaboration using interactive whiteboards

Remember those old whiteboards you had to wheel from room to room in the office? As meeting rooms get smaller, you’d be lucky to get one of those into most modern spaces. They’re a thing of the past now as staff needs demand flexible, portable solutions for interactive conferencing.

Better meetings for satisfied staff

Practical use of technology for smarter meetings is key to staff collaborating on projects – and could make the difference between a successful product development or launch and an idea that doesn’t quite get off the ground.

Meeting technology that works means:

• meetings start on time and aren’t interrupted by connection or staff usability issues
• connections are made between staff to build productive working relationships
• your staff feel supported and that their time is valued
• staff spend less time travelling
• boosted productivity which is good for your business bottom line.

Ricoh tip: Encouraging conferencing for face-to-face interaction can lead to increased meeting participation, faster resolution of issues and faster time to market for new products and services.