AVT Question: Please share insight into your company's roadmap for 2023.
Thought Leader: Stijn Henderickx, Executive Vice President, Meeting and Learning Experience at Barco
Today, we meet differently than a few years ago. With hybrid work as the standard in the post-pandemic world, the biggest challenge is making sure everyone is equally seen and heard. That’s where people-centric collaboration technology enters the room.
Recent ClickShare research shows that 55 percent of employees worldwide have adopted a hybrid working pattern, switching days at home with days in the office. While we all see the value of remote working, keeping the connection between in-office and remote workers has proven to be a challenge. People often don’t feel part of the conversation.
If the hybrid workplace is to be successful, we clearly need technology that enables better, smarter collaboration—technology that helps us to work the way we want and use the devices and conferencing platforms we are comfortable with." —Stijn Henderickx, Executive Vice President, Meeting and Learning Experience at Barco
Seventy percent of face-to-face communication is related to facial expressions and overall body language. Non-verbal expressions have been singled out as being especially difficult to capture in a virtual meeting setting. This may explain why 60 percent of all workers say that hybrid meetings are less effective. Meetings are as much about human interaction as they are the content presented. To combat this sentiment towards hybrid meetings, it is crucial to ensure that everyone can see all participants equally, along with their non-verbal cues.
Barco has been measuring how people perceive the quality of meetings. In its inaugural year, 2019, their Meeting Barometer calculated this sentiment with a positive value of 63. During the pandemic in 2021, the score dropped dramatically to its lowest value yet at -38. Finally, in the most recent research, the score recovered slightly to -32.
Still, the overall sentiment is negative. Sixty percent experience technical challenges when joining hybrid meetings: audio is not working properly, sharing content and booking a room is hard, and people don’t know which cable to use.
If the hybrid workplace is to be successful, we clearly need technology that enables better, smarter collaboration—technology that helps us to work the way we want and use the devices and conferencing platforms we are comfortable with. We need technology that focuses on meeting equity. This is exactly where collaboration room systems like ClickShare come in, to make meetings more inclusive, intuitive and productive.
