Features of a Smart Meeting Room

Meeting rooms are an inseparable part of a business. You use them to present ideas to clients and employees, gather feedback, brainstorm, and conduct various other activities.

However, if it takes you half an hour to find an available meeting room and then another fifteen minutes to plug in and set up all the devices, it could negatively impact the productivity of your team. This is why a meeting room needs to have all the required features that will bring the redundant activities down to a minimum and enhance the effectiveness of the session.

Meeting Room Requirements

To make meetings more productive, you should set up a meeting room in a building with modern facilities. In meeting room, you can provide some additional comfort such as ergonomic office chairs, air conditioning, as well as light and temperature controls.

The interior design shouldn’t be too sterile, but be careful not to make it too distracting either. Both options can be counterproductive. At the same time, modern conference spaces can have different rooms. For example, one can be a corporate boardroom with a smart whiteboard, while the other can be a comfortable room with sofas for casual conversation.

In the end, the most important part is having the necessary technology. Judging by recent studies, more than 90% of employees say that having required technology has the greatest impact on their work happiness. We’ll talk about this in the next section.

Supply the Smart Room with All the Necessities 

When investing in smart meeting room technology, there are certain things you should always include. First of all, you should make sure there are enough power cords for the employees to plug in their laptops, smartphones, and other devices.

Then, supply the smart room with additional necessities. A good internet connection is essential, and a screen mirroring function will be useful for web presentations that include multimedia content, as well as video conferences.

Lastly, you should look to make the meeting room as user-friendly as possible. A lot of the employees that visit the room won’t be tech-savvy. You should reduce their time working around all the gadgets and devices and let them focus on brainstorming and creativity. The simplest way to avoid this is to implement a control panel or a smart board that would allow them to easily connect their devices.

Get a Meeting Room Smart Board

Every meeting room needs something to view content on. However, you’ll rarely find traditional message boards and blackboards in modern meeting rooms, as they are usually replaced with a meeting room smart board. These are a must-have of every smart meeting room.

Thanks to smart boards, conferences have never been more convenient. You can use the same device for note-taking, brainstorming, using Microsoft Office apps, browsing the internet, and more. This also makes it easier for your remote employees to participate in the meeting room as you can also use the smart board for video conferencing.
The whiteboard can allow users to connect easily from their own devices to this interactive board, leave their own notes, save and upload files, and access many other features. Some of the best interactive boards currently on the market include the Samsung Flip, Google Jamboard, Cisco Vebex, and the Microsoft Surface Hub.

Set Up a Booking and Security System

You should set up a smart meeting room system for both bookings of the room and data security.
When it comes to booking, a lot of organisations use simple booking methods like Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar to easily schedule a session. However, this can lead to an unnecessary shortage of available slots if, say, a team books this way and doesn’t show up.

To avoid this, a lot of organisations started relying on new technologies that can cancel the appointment automatically if nobody checks in to the system for 15 minutes, thus making the space available for another team. This system can also block or blacklist a team that doesn’t show up at the appointed session several times.

On the security front, it’s important that all the data from the smart boards is removed once the meeting is over. The smart boards allow all the users to download the session for later review, and there’s a feature that allows you to record a conference and send it to absent colleagues.

Most of these devices allow each member to hit an “I’m done” button next to their name when finished going through all the data. When the last member clicks the button, the board will delete all the content from the session.

As Productive as It Gets

As you can see, a good meeting room requires a functioning booking and security system, good interior design, and access to the latest technology. Well-supplied meeting rooms are the simplest and at the same time most effective.
So before you set up a meeting, make sure that the space you’re bringing your team to has all the necessary features. Otherwise, you can only blame yourself if your team’s productivity is not at the required level.