Meetings in the Post-Pandemic Era

It’s time to redefine the meeting infrastructure

Organizations are becoming more familiar with virtual meetings and video conferencing technologies as they offer various benefits, including easy access from anywhere, reduced costs, and greater efficiency. However, there are many challenges when it comes to making a virtual meeting effective.

Here’s how you can redefine the meeting experience:

Virtual meeting standards

Define specific practices for virtual meetings, such as:

• Use the most accessible technology
• Use a clear and stable phone line
• Avoid multi-tasking
• Ensure each person gets a chance to respond
• Use video for participation
• Sit in a quiet space

Employees should discuss and co-create the meeting norms to help improve the overall process and experience.

It’s also important to have recurring meetings and regular meeting times that will help employees feel more engaged and connected. It will increase collaboration, reduce communication barriers and help improve productivity.

New communication paradigm

Now, employees can use a single click to access all their communications using a unified communications application. It combines a variety of real-time communication tools in a single interface, including web conferencing, audio and video conferencing, telephony and PC based information, voice capabilities, and instant messaging.

It enables employees to communicate with customers or co-workers quickly and easily. Users don’t have to plan collaboration sessions or reserve in advance as it delivers on-demand capabilities with simple-to-use communication technology.

Future tech trends

There has been a surge of technology built to transform the way we attend and organize meetings. According to research from Barco ClickShare, professionals expect a range of technologies to be available for meetings in the future. Some of these future tech trends include voice recognition, hand gestures, video filters, AR, VR, avatars, and bots.

Voice recognition

Voice recognition is predicted to be one of the biggest changes for the office environment with the same level of sophistication as personal tech. This technology will listen to commands to set up a call, type out dictation or even look up data. 

Intelligent automation

Timecoding, automatic transcription and cloud recording will be new features for intelligent communication. They will enable team members to search within the conversation, read captions, and playback the meeting.

Hand-gesture recognition

Hand-gesture recognition could be used in meeting rooms to control technology, such as switching lights on/off, adjusting their brightness, or swiping between slides. This could greatly increase convenience and improve the efficiency of meetings.

Augmented reality

Augmented Reality (AR) has the significant potential to overlay information in real-time for members of a meeting, creating realistic, to-scale models or interactive presentations.

Virtual assistants

A robot can bring many advantages to a meeting by being a virtual assistant, such as a timekeeper, a facilitator, a researcher, or a notetaker. Introducing an avatar or a bot can bring real value to meetings by reducing the administrative work and enhancing the meeting experience.

What does the future of meetings look like?

There are a lot of predictions for the future of physical meetings:

• The number of people in a meeting will reduce
• Every meeting room may have sanitizers, gloves, and mask
• Individuals will be required to check their temperatures or get a test before coming into the meeting room.

However, virtual meetings could be the answer. Employees can meet face-to-face using on-demand video conferencing without scheduling a meeting in advance. As the need arises for a collaboration session, conference hosts and members can do it at any time. Thus, it gets a lot easier to bridge the communication gap that was once a challenge during virtual meetings.

With the increasing number of virtual and remote employees, the demands of a business to stay competitive are increasing. Virtual teams need to collaborate easily, regularly, and cost-effectively to ensure businesses boost revenues and save costs. To achieve all these goals, unified communication technologies play a major role.

Further reading

• 4 Video Conferencing Benefits You're Missing Out On
• 6 Things You Should Never Do in a Remote Meeting
• The Anywhere Worker Guidebook