As organisations slowly return to the office, many employees are looking forward to the impromptu meetings and conversations with their colleagues that have been absent since the mass shift to remote working. However, it won’t be an exact return to the pre-pandemic norm as offices will have to cater to spacing restrictions and hybrid workers.
Office managers are now dealing with a whole set of new collaborative challenges in a post-lockdown world. One of these issues is the need for multi-purpose, re-configurable rooms – such as a large space that can be divided into smaller rooms – which can ensure safe distancing between people, while allowing everyone to hear and be heard clearly.
“The type of spaces that businesses are trying to utilise to get people back into the office are different than the spaces that used to exist,” explained Rob Abbott, VP of Products at Nureva.
“Organisations want people back in the same room but want them to be distanced and still heard. The number of people that have asked us for audio solutions for configurable rooms has really gone up. That’s a good example of how people are realising they need these larger spaces and the audio to go with them, and are getting creative with the space they have.”
Another issue is the preference for many employees to work part of the week in the office and the rest working from home. Managers must ensure that those working remotely are not left out and that their voice is being heard – literally and figuratively – in meetings just as much as those of their colleagues’ who are in the office.
“The pandemic has resulted in a lot of equality in the way companies work now that wasn’t there before. Pre-COVID, for example, headquarters used to be the source of most of the company’s activity and if you worked remotely, you had to put up with some trade-offs,” Abbott said.
“People’s expectations have risen with regards to being equal participants in sessions and they won’t put up with the same experiences they used to. They now expect when they’re in a large collaboration session to hear and be heard – regardless of if they are in the office or not.”
How to Overcome These Hurdles
To ensure employees are being heard, managers must consider flexible audioconferencing systems. However, many contemporary systems can be complex, require time-consuming installation and cannot scale without having to manually re-calibrate the whole system.
Nureva’s Microphone Mist technology provides a cost-effective solution to these challenges, ensuring that everyone in a collaboration session – including remote participants – can hear each other clearly.
“We’re not just following the pack and using beamforming microphones; we’re trying to extend the state of the art with our Microphone Mist technology to be able to deliver full room audio,” stated Abbott.
“Collaboration sessions are not static affairs. Post-pandemic, meetings won’t be done with all team members in the office, they’ll be done with people in and out of the office. The spaces are going to be messy and active and need to have the audio capabilities to ensure seamless communication between all participants, wherever they’re based.
“We’re putting audio technology out into those environments so that people can work, even when everyone isn’t in the room.”
