Where we work, how we work?

• Features

• 07/01/2021

The corporate sector is on the move. If you have been following our coverage over the course of the last six months or so, the direction of change in Asia Pacific’s corporate spaces starts to become clear.

The AV upgrades at Jones Lang LaSalle’s [JLL] different offices in the APAC region focused on increasing productivity. Patrick Stewart-Blacker, specialist advisor on smart buildings within JLL’s digital solutions, says: “Building people-centric office spaces requires us to deliver a frictionless experience day to day, where the technology enables a better working environment without teams even noticing.”

At Insurance Australia Group’s [IAG] office in Sydney the drive was to ensure that technology was serving the needs of the users by enhancing areas. Clayton Pickering, senior project manager for infrastructure delivery, group technology at IAG, says: “We are seeing that open spaces are massively under-utilised while meeting rooms are at maximum utilisation. This means we have to find a way to make open space areas more engaging for people.”

With these changes the role of AV was evolving. Krick Lau, executive director of Principle One, sheds light: “There is no template that can cater to every meeting requirement of every client. Say 10 years ago, a client may have wanted presentation, videoconferencing and control for a boardroom and then they would duplicate and expand this functionality for 15 other rooms. Today, the trend is to have a few, well developed multi-purpose spaces and then have the rest of the rooms be very basic and self-driven. The customised multi-purpose rooms are still handled by AV, but the smaller rooms now might be handled by IT or telcos. AV seems to be concentrating on the high-end spaces and service.”

AV professionals have been adapting to these trends. Some have a head start as Lau adds: “One of the reasons Principle One has strong differentiation from other competitors is because we have always been an AV and an IT company. We don’t mind if the budget for corporate deployments is all with the AV department, all with the IT department or split between them because we feel confident that we can engage with both of them and demonstrate the value we bring to the table.”

Fuel on the fire

The Covid-19 outbreak however has thrown fuel on the fire. Lau says: “To be honest, the corporate sector was evolving before Covid-19 with the convergence of AV and IT. There was a transition from hardware-based videoconferencing towards software-based videoconferencing. What the disruption caused by Covid-19 has done to the corporate sector is accelerate the rate of its evolution.”

Mark Buckley, director UC & services, Midwich APAC, gives further details: “Covid-19 has changed the way we are all going to work. It has actually brought three generations of the workforce together on the same platform and medium. For example, my son would never call someone, instead preferring to just text them and senior employees would prefer face-to-face meetings. Now, they are all on a UC platform conducting business with videoconferencing.”

Michael Broadbent, managing director, Midwich APAC, agrees saying: “People are more comfortable with videoconferencing and they see the benefits of it. UC has become a business-critical tool and the numbers back this up. Take Zoom for an example which has seen the number of users and the number of active calls being made on the platform skyrocket.”

Lau confirms that with the disruption caused by Covid-19, the focus of the corporate sector has surely turned to unified communications and collaboration (UC&C): “We are being approached by clients that have a number of meeting rooms with traditional videoconferencing and a lot of smaller spaces or huddle rooms where users can bring in their laptops and just connect to the in-room camera and microphone and be on their way. These clients are now demanding a solution to bridge these different spaces together. They want to bridge the gap between a traditional, boardroom style videoconferencing experience which has dedicated, sophisticated systems and a casual videoconferencing experience on the other end of the spectrum.”

According to Lau an elegant solution to the problem of bridging multiple conferencing platforms is not easy to find: “Open platforms, such as H.323 or H.320 which are similar to how a telephone system works, could be a solution. But right now, the videoconferencing market is so fragmented with so many different players such as Zoom, Teams, WebEx and more that a common standard is just not possible. It then becomes a matter of seeing which player can get the largest market share and market penetration.”

Office away from office

The responses from governments around the world on how to manage the Covid-19 outbreak have had a significant impact on the corporate sector. This impact is expected to have long-lasting effect. Matthew Deayton from Vega Global says: “We’ve just run the largest global experiment on work from home and how we communicate for work due to Covid-19. What has become highly evident is that the changes to how we work will be a continued mode of operation not for the whole workforce but for a significant chunk of it. The implication of this is that corporations will need to upgrade their infrastructure to support it.”

Attention is squarely on videoconferencing. The question now is how do we get remote workers online, onto UC platforms and allow them to conduct their day-to-day activities with as seamless an experience as possible?

Deayton from Vega believes the progression of technology outside of AV might lend a helping hand: “Corporate operators will have to come to terms with the fact that a lot more people will be using web-based videoconferencing and collaboration platforms and I think this could be a perfect storm.”

Deayton continues: “With the prevalence of work from home, the 5G component comes into play. People obviously want to connect and share content with much higher resolutions across the cell phone networks. With people wanting to have setups in their homes or remote locations that are a lot more robust and more in line with an office experience, then 5G can play a massive role in facilitating and boosting that.”

Improvements to the UC platforms and tools themselves also help, but there is still a chasm between the experience offered by a home office and a corporate space. Deayton says: “Web-based videoconferencing is coming to the party. You can add virtual backdrops and hide visual noise and they are obviously putting effort into improving the audio and image quality. But of course, you are restricted by the physical environment you are operating in and if you are at home with the kids and the dog and all the peripheral stuff going around then that is going to have a direct impact on the experience.”

But, with frequent use and familiarity the home office experience can only get better.

Buckley from Midwich says: “As people become more familiar with the home office, the quality of their home office will increase which in turn will make them more comfortable in using it. Initially, this will require support and refreshed technology which will lead to better quality of life, a better experience and more professionalism and I think there is going to be an upsurge in providing these solutions.”

Deayton too identifies an opportunity for AV to step in and help make the home office experience better. He details: “Vega did a prototype for the Singapore government where we developed a pod that was a self-contained unit which could be put into someone’s home and they would have lighting, a camera and all the infrastructure needed. You could just sit in the pod and have a reasonably controlled experience which means that the quality of the sound and the quality of the visuals can be maintained.”

Buckley believes that working from home is bound to continue but the office-proper will respond and still have a role to play. He says: “Of course, we are enjoying the opportunity to work from home but I think we miss the business, office environment. We may see an increase of 30% to 40% in the number of people that would like to incorporate working from home into their routines, but the office environment will still be needed. It might be a different environment, a more collaborative environment, but it can never be replaced.”

Deayton surmises: “The long and short of it is that we will probably become a lot more comfortable with videoconferencing and collaboration experiences that have a varying level of quality.”

The way forward With the corporate sector in flux, it is vital for the AV industry to engage with the end user. Deayton from Vega says: “The discussions we are having with clients are really around analysing and doing a deep dive into the use cases they have. At the end of the day, corporate clients have different departments with different needs, and they might just be using different platforms. A lot of the discussions are about what they have learned from the work from home experience over the last few months, what has gone well and what has not gone well and what solution or solutions will support their new operations moving forward.”

According to Deayton, these conversations will be crucial to determining how the corporate sector is going to evolve: “The way that we work in the office or not work in the office is definitely going to change and the office environment itself is going to change quite dramatically. I think there will be an increase in videoconference and presentation enabled rooms that allow up to four people to go in and work. I suspect that the hot-desking kind of environment will decrease in popularity, because people will be a lot less comfortable going to a desk where other people also work.”

Broadbent believes there may also be a shift in how people interact with technology and shares some of the discussions taking place within his team: “We have been having a discussion around touchscreens. They have become widely-used for room control but will they remain in rooms after Covid-19? I don’t think so. Maybe voice activation or proximity sensors might be something the AV industry needs to start looking at?”

Buckley agrees there are quite a number of innovative solutions: “You can use Bluetooth beacons so that when you walk near your meeting rooms all the basic functions like mute, start, volume up and volume down, simple functionality can be controlled from your phone. If we wait and see, someone might just come up with a phone app that ties into Zoom and Teams and does all that but we will need to account for the fact that you also need to link with your calendar and meeting rooms and there is a lot of room to explore with AI in this area.”

Buckley believes it is time for the AV industry to step up and move on what is required: “As a service turnkey solutions provider for the customer, this is a massive opportunity for us. Before this, AV and its tools were a nice to have versus now being considered business critical. Post Covid-19, these tools and platforms are going to be owned by the CIO and they will be owned at the executive level.”

Deayton concludes: “The interesting thing coming out of this is the dialogue we are having with larger clients particularly at a senior level. The impact of Covid-19 has crystallised in a lot of their minds that the current infrastructure in place for them is not necessarily robust enough to deal with the sheer volume of people having to work and communicate and collaborate remotely. They are already starting to talk to us about what we can do to help them address some of the limitations and shortcomings that their current infrastructure has.”