Corporate: Getting to work

• Features

• 04/01/2022

Wholescale transformation is more difficult to enact than incremental change and this is why many business leaders avoid revolution, even if changing comes with positives. However, sometimes revolution is the only way to stay afloat.

When Covid-19 hit, corporate rulebooks were torn up because they needed to be. Take the topic of ‘working from home’. Long considered to be unfeasible and not worth trialling, it is now becoming a cornerstone of work routines across the globe because disruption forced its implementation. And once work from home was implemented its viability became apparent.

Building the workspace back after the pandemic should be seen as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity we cannot afford to squander, and it is being approached as such by the corporate sector. However, there is work to be done to determine what features and how much of them need to be implemented. For example, workers are demanding flexibility of time and location when it comes to work. But they still value in-person interaction and collaboration. What is the balance between the two?

To deliver these diverse features the corporate sector is going ‘hybrid’. It might be a buzzword, but the term holds weight. After all, what would you call working routines that marry both the remote location and in-office presence?

The first few decisions around hybrid work lie with HR. What does ‘hybrid work’ look like for your organisation? Is it just one day from the remote location and the rest of the days in the office? Or do you want a 3:2 split? Companies will have to make these calls for themselves. From there, the job of bridging the remote location and the office falls to technology.

Videoconferencing is going to be the glue that connects it all, but what about employee management? The corporate sector is looking for platforms that can enable employees to not only book and plan their time in the office and the remote location but also help them manage and address concerns.

It is not surprising to see that health and wellness is at the top of the list of considerations for both employees and employers. Can the platforms help address the concerns of both parties? Anyone can see that there is a lot of opportunity for AV to play a part in how workspaces evolve. In fact, dare we say it, this is an unprecedented chance for AV to sit at the table with real estate, architecture, interior design, HR and many more stakeholders to have its say in how the workspace will evolve.

The real question is, is AV ready to take its seat at the table?

Who knows what UX is?

Everyone knows what it stands for, user experience, but this is where knowledge seems to end for many of us.

In AV terms it’s been used to describe GUI design. Adam Banks, co-founder, UX-Study, an agency specialising in designing and creating spaces for research, says: “Go back 15 to 20 years, we added an AMX panel with an interface designed by someone who doesn’t know a great deal about UX design. Fast forward to now, you’ve got an AMX panel or Crestron panel with a much higher resolution interface, but it’s still designed by someone who doesn’t know about UX design.”

However, the message of UX is slowly getting through argues Tony McCool, head of interactive and collaborative solutions pro-AV, from distributor Exertis: “The choice for customers can be confusing. We shifted our language and changed our approach. We never speak about products first. We always talk user experience and expectations; what do you want to do? How do you want to work? What do your face-to-face meetings/gatherings look like?”

Banks believes that AV can no longer afford to ignore UX. He believes AV must get people with UX skills in to AV businesses or nothing will change: “If you are going through a user journey from someone wanting to design something, save it, edit it, a design system gives you descriptions of how that journey should work. These are the underlying systems that most companies use now, but the AV world just doesn’t. The nearest the AV world gets to a design system is ‘Bob’, who has been designing touch panels for the past 20 years and has a load of icons saved on his Windows laptop. That was true 20 years ago, and it’s true now.”

So, what exactly is stopping AV from jumping aboard the UX train? Rory Brannigan, CEO from integrator ISDM, offers one explanation: “A preoccupation with user experience and the drive for change can make for uneasy bedfellows and perhaps the AV industry feels that being drenched in user feedback all the time, would slow the innovative progress that it has enjoyed for so many years. Innovation is often coming up with products and solutions which people didn’t necessarily ask for, or even know that they needed. No one was lamenting the fact they didn’t have Netflix or an iPhone in the 1980s for example.”

But Brannigan believes there is significant upside to integrating UX into AV’s workflow. He concludes: “It’s an investment into the satisfaction of your customers and will strengthen the relationship.”

Health = wealth

Perhaps the biggest new opportunity for AV in the corporate sector is around health and wellness. Mradul Sharma, managing director at 3CDN, says: “Health and wellness is top of the list in terms of priority for clients when they are planning new corporate spaces. We’re not experts on health and wellness by any means, but we need to look for technologies, ideas and thoughts that OEMs can throw at us so that we can talk to customers based on those data points.”

Unpacking the health and wellness component is different because the term serves as an umbrella for a range of topics. Sharma elaborates: “Zoom burnout is the top issue right now. The other piece that we are hearing about when engaging with our customers and design partners is that working remotely can cause people to feel isolated which is linked to a number of adverse mental health outcomes. Looking at how this is being combatted, data suggests that more and more people are turning on their video when on a call. But that leads to heightened self-awareness which can have its own side effects. It is a slippery slope. You try to solve one problem but end up creating a new one.”

Addressing and answering these challenges has seen an existing stakeholder gain greater prominence in conversations. Sharma says: “HR departments across organisations are aware of the situation and they are adopting and implementing new strategies to minimise and reduce Zoom burnout and fatigue. They’re careful about making sure that employee schedules are spaced to avoid back-to-back meetings. Wellness tools and apps are being trialled so that HR has the data to be able to make informed decisions and naturally technology is being leveraged in these areas.”

What is universally true is that technology is being considered as the tool to help address health and wellness in corporate spaces. This means that AV is being asked to step up to the plate.

Blessing E. Joseph, managing director of Vega India, details: “I think we’re being pulled right into it. Health and wellness is a vast topic starting from sanitisation all the way to employee and facility management.”

He highlights some technology components for AV professionals to take note of if they want to remain relevant in the sector: “As an integrator, what we are seeing in the market with our customers is a trend towards management systems that can deliver contact tracing, proximity detection, headcount and link with facility management systems. This ‘digital concierge’ is really gaining traction. Corporate spaces need to have touch free rooms that need to be booked and managed and scheduled and this has always been a strong suite of AV. But now with these new requirements and demands based around health and wellness, we are looking at solutions that are taking us in new directions such as IoT.”