Hardware

One display, many uses

Lauren Simmen, director, product marketing, Crestron shares tips on success with your hybrid work environment, from schools to boardrooms and beyond.

Courtesy of Adobe Stock.

April 18, 2023 | Lauren Simmen, Director of Product Marketing, Crestron

The new watchwords for digital displays may well be "double duty" — or even "triple duty" and beyond.

The pandemic and its rolling waves of work from home followed by return to office has now settled into a state of what's come to be called hybrid permanence. That's one of the key findings from a Crestron report, which revealed that every week over 80% of the employees surveyed have meetings that include at least one remote participant.

Additionally, "Sixty percent of employee respondents said that at least half of their meetings involve remote participants; 30% said that nearly all of them do," according to Nidhi Madhavan of Reworked, the firm that partnered with Crestron to create the report.

In the early days of hybrid work, many companies were scrambling to accommodate that mix of in-office and remote collaborators. Many spaces didn't have the right connectivity, cameras or displays. Most of those firms soon realized they needed to invest in the right equipment to ensure that every space had some kind of workable unified communications setup, no matter the size.

The upside: Displays that had been deployed for a single use now had the potential to do more than one job. Signage in a break room could also be used for collaboration, for example. A connected workforce that's part remote, part in-office on a given day needs the ability to connect at a moment's notice — for both business and social interactions.

The Wireless Conferencing Solution

The challenge, naturally, is getting content and connectivity to all those displays. There are solutions, though, and one of the best is wireless conferencing. Essentially, any display that's part of a conferencing-compatible system can be leveraged as a meeting venue, allowing companies to adopt non-traditional spaces to help keep up with the demand and increase of hybrid meetings.

These solutions work for collaboration and sharing content, and new devices are being introduced that allow simple plug-andplay functionality, such as dongles that allow for the connectivity of any device without the need for any additional apps or software — in this case, compatibility with your team's preferred tools, such as Microsoft Teams, is an essential part of the solution.

Organizations have the opportunity to get creative with the real estate they currently have to fit their meeting needs, as wireless conferencing allows a business to bypass the time and expense of running cable. It's especially convenient for turning smaller spaces into connected meeting rooms.

There's another benefit to these systems: They meet the growing demand for bring-your-own-device solutions (often shortened to BYOD).

Why BYOD Has Become a Big Deal

And what's driving that demand for BYOD?

The mix of in-office and work-from-home schedules means laptops and tablets travel with their users. More and more people are turning to smartphone business apps to stay connected with work. Modern hybrid workers are now as reliant on their phones and laptops as they once were on fixed machines.

Beyond that, if you're a business hosting an outside consultant, contractor or salesperson — or any guest at all — they will likely be sharing some kind of content digitally. This could be a complete presentation, a document for live collaboration, or simply a spreadsheet with figures referenced in the presentation. The ability to work together on those digital assets that the guest has brought into the building — with as little friction as possible — is a must in the hybrid work environment.

Without BYOD solutions, that collaboration can be a major hassle. Finding a collaborative means of communication (email, Dropbox, et cetera), loading it onto the proper device, dealing with any unforeseen glitches — it all adds up. And what if your machine doesn't have the right program to open the content in question? The ability of a BYOD collaborator to call up a file on their tablet and send that content right to a display saves time and frustration. Ultimately, it's all about finding the most user-friendly workflow possible.

The same holds for the classroom, as digital signage grows in the education sector. A guest lecturer may want to use their own machine for a presentation. And you'll rarely find an entire class of students using the same technology platforms, to say nothing about the constant need for cybersecurity.

That's why flexibility is key, and one of the easiest steps is using a growing array of hardware and software solutions that can turn each of your displays into a multifunction device, capable of switching from digital signage to videoconferencing or wayfinding with the push of a button.

To make the most of your hybrid environment — from the classroom to the boardroom, and everywhere between — aim for secure, wide-ranging BYOD compatibility while maintaining a consistent user experience across the ecosystem. In this way, you will minimize hassle for your users, maximize your own resources and ROI, and create a little surprise and delight for everyone involved!