We love meetings, but how about our meeting rooms?

Roy is the CEO of a services company and he has a busy schedule while at office. He has his routine staff meetings, strategy meetings, investor calls and town halls for employee engagement town. Being a hands-on CEO, he prefers to have his discussions in person and since he facilitated distributed working/ remote working during COVID times, he is a promoter of the hybrid work culture as well. Fortunately, Roy has a fancy board room that is set up with the latest communication technology from an international brand that allows him to have effective video communication with all remote participants.

Ramesh is a service manager in the same firm and unsurprisingly, he too has a very busy schedule. A typical day is full of meetings/calls - both scheduled and unscheduled. His daily meetings include a team huddle, monthly performance reviews with clients, internal performance reviews, cross functional team meetings on specific projects/problems and the list goes on. Ramesh is one of 100+ such service managers in the firm and it is always a struggle to find a meeting room that can hold at least 4 participants. Even if he manages to find/book a room, he does his meetings with the remote participants using his laptop, which is sometimes also connected to the TV available in the room. When he does meetings in a group with his clients who are remote, his team tries to huddle behind him or join the meeting from the same room in a companion mode. The experience is never great as he struggles with active participation from his team and audibility issues. “Can this not be better?” - Ramesh would often ponder.

The above example is representative of life at corporate offices in almost all businesses. A typical work day is full of meetings or rather opportunities for collaboration and co-working. Businesses have a fancy board room that is usually fitted with top end VC solutions. However, the vast majority of the organisation does not have access to this set up and struggles to effectively collaborate in the smaller meeting or huddle rooms where remote participation is the norm. The reason is that these smaller meeting rooms do not have anything other than a TV where one can present a laptop screen using a HDMI cable. Group meetings with remote participation are always done with hacky laptop based solutions. The most common reason for the lack of adequate VC equipment is the high cost barrier of the currently available solutions. Even when people put together solutions with the help of systems integrators, they are less elegant and require complicated setups with multiple moving parts. Thirdly, most companies require support for multiple meeting platforms and that turns out to be a constraint with the existing solutions.

Our research shows that 80-90% of meeting spaces in offices do not have any video communication set up. It is a BYOD set up largely and people have learned to manage. However, such meetings are usually less productive with a lot of passive participation. Limited by the range of the microphone in the laptop, meetings suffer from audibility issues for participants on the other end. The solution for this problem is to have simple, easy to use, cost effective video communication solutions with high quality audio/video that can be a “plug and play” in any meeting room and can let users start and run meetings across any platform with the click of a button. Every participant in the room is visible and becomes an active participant. Meetings are suddenly less of a hassle and more of  sessions where a lot of work gets done by overcoming challenges imposed by technology & facilitating involved discussions. Sounds ideal right?

We at TIFOH are on a mission to bring such solutions to businesses with extremely functional VC products that can turn any meeting space into a powerful collaboration space. Do you want to know more about that? Check out our products page or write to us at sales@tifoh.com