Most meetings happen outside the conference room
What do people usually have in mind when they think about meetings? Mostly, it’s a group of people gathered around a conference table watching a presentation on a large display. And yet, most meetings are informal and happen outside the typical conference room environment. Think about team discussions, customer visits, training sessions, project reviews, showroom sales pitches. These are just a few examples of the many informal meeting opportunities that present themselves when working with other people.
It’s too easy for ideas to get lost
More often than not, valuable ideas coming up during an informal meeting just get lost. Or they require too much follow-up because there is no easy way to document them. The result? Nothing less than a series of missed opportunities. Especially as most people are bringing a laptop, tablet or smartphone with them anyway.
That’s what gave us the inspiration for crowdbeamer. Crowdbeamer is a solution that allows everybody in any meeting to capture the information that is being shared. Crowdbeamer enables everybody to complement these snapshots with personal notes and ideas. That’s how easy it is for anybody to make the information more relevant to themselves.
Informal meetings are crucial to a company’s success
According to Verne Harnish, author of the bestselling book “Mastering the Rockefeller Habits”, the kind of daily informal meeting in which team members share issues and priorities is crucial to a company’s success. There are 2 primary reasons for this. First, daily informal meetings keep all members of the team informed. Second, they help to hold people accountable for how they contribute to the team. Even if the focus of such informal meetings is not on problem-solving, they usually have a positive impact in this regard as well. That’s because they create a mechanism. A mechanism that makes it easier and more natural for everybody to share ideas and solutions. A mechanism that works even outside the context of the daily meeting.
Social meeting spaces boost collaboration and productivity
It’s therefore not surprising that social meeting spaces are gaining popularity within many companies. Often referred to as huddle spaces, these semi-enclosed areas provide a relaxed environment. That encourages colleagues to engage in a more interactive way. Also perfect for a drop-in discussion over a cup of coffee, these spaces boost collaboration and productivity. And since conversations in this environment are typically short and informal, content sharing tends to focus on visual information rather than text. Hardly surprising, considering that people almost always bring a tablet or smartphone with them.
Have the team focused on making eye contact
Social meeting spaces usually lack any advanced technologies such as a television display or an interactive whiteboard. To put it even stronger: they should lack any such technologies, to have the entire team focused on making eye contact while sharing information. Personal screen sharing solutions can therefore significantly contribute to an informal meeting, making the best use of individual client devices (BYOD) that people bring along.
Deliver visual content to each team member
That’s precisely where crowdbeamer proves to be invaluable: it directly brings the content being shared to each person. And knowing that such content can instantly be captured when needed, it has a positive impact on meeting dynamics – maintaining a natural discussion environment. That’s how crowdbeamer provides teams and organizations with a flexible solution maximizing both office space utilization and employee productivity.
If you want to know more about that, you should read our free white paper. It will help you get the most out of all your meeting spaces and make your meetings more productive. Especially if you are on a tight budget.