5 ways to maximize your conference room and increase meeting creativity
The average person spends about 35-50 percent of their time at work in conference rooms. Long, inefficient meetings can be creativity, productivity and workplace morale killers. But meetings don’t have to feel like a drag. To cultivate positive workplace culture, it’s crucial to prepare ahead of time and ensure your conference room is equipped with essentials to keep people in a problem-solving and creative state of mind.
Here are five simple tips on how to make your conference room more productive and maximize creativity:
Ensure remote presentation sharing is simple and secure
More than 43 percent of employees say they’ve spent time this last year working remotely, a continually rising statistic. Companies have reported that offering remote work to their employees can drive employee efficiency and boost overall morale.
When showcasing a presentation, it can be a challenge to display information on the big screen of the conference room and also online so employees not physically present can see it digitally in a secure way. The Mimo Vue Capture Capacitive Touch Display with HDMI Capture solves this problem and eliminates the need for USB drives. Due to having a capture card built into the device and the ability to securely digitize data, it makes conferencing seamless and provides a quick, secure way to sync everyone up across devices and locations.
Create a collaborative environment
Space to move around and the act of writing things down are both shown to positively impact creativity, collaboration and memory retention, all of which make meetings more fun and increase efficiency.
Movement is directly linked to better idea generation, so the best ideas are often cultivated when employees are able to tap into their creativity and freely move about. Set up the conference room to encourage movement and get people up and moving for better idea flow. Have desks face each other to provoke conversation, brainstorming and collaboration when attendees are seated.
Studies also show there are still many benefits to writing vs. typing in terms of memory retention and creativity. It can be helpful to have a whiteboard on hand with working markers to encourage the folks in the meeting to collectively write down their ideas.
Keep tabs on when the conference room is available
Conference rooms can be a frustrating digital process with constantly evolving schedules and multiple conference rooms on-site.
Keeping a tablet like the Mimo Adapt-IQ 10.1” with LED outside the conference room can allow employees to know if a conference room is currently in use or available. With green denoting that the room is currently available, and red showing that it’s in use, it’s an accessible, time-saving, and intuitive way to have conference room availability updated in real time.
Ensure comfort
The conference room should always be designed with employee comfort top-of-mind. There’s no quicker way to kill creativity and create bad attitudes than to place employees in an uncomfortable seating arrangement with no water or food.
This is a place where comfort should go before style (although it is certainly possible to have both). Ensure the conference room has chairs that are designed for comfort, not just for looks. To encourage collaboration and productivity, have water and food on hand to keep the creative juices flowing. Meetings will be much more productive if employees are comfortable and have all their basic needs met.
Hardware, software, and cables for online connectivity
Nothing is more frustrating than having everyone in the conference room ready to start the meeting when the right cable goes missing, the online meeting is not syncing correctly, or someone forgot the USB camera. To ensure this doesn’t happen, equip your conference room for online connectivity and always make sure you’re set up for contingencies.
Keep your cables and adapters organized and always have access to an adapter for MHL (android phones), lighting to HDMI (iPhone), display port (Mac and new laptops), and Mini and Micro HDMI (other laptops).
Additionally, to prepare for online meetings, it's crucial to have synchronized software, a conference room with hardware designed to handle meetings remotely, a good speakerphone and a high-quality tilt/pan/zoom USB camera.