While you’re working at home, think about getting your office ready for better collaboration

The Wall Street Journal estimates that 40% of employees waste half an hour per day looking for meeting spaces. And while most meetings usually involve only two to four people, conference rooms across the globe are typically built for meetings of seven or more, meaning most offices are structured to be at odds with its own employees. And as other traditional offices evolve into flexible bring-your-own-device environments where WFH employees come and go as needed, truly collaborative meetings may come few and far between. Considering that projects live and die by small teams and their ability to collaborate at a moment’s notice, how does one cut down on time wasted and increase productivity?

Luckily, it doesn’t have to start by breaking the bank to build more meeting areas. There are already 33 million huddle spaces worldwide and it’s easy to understand why—they’re tailor-made for meetings, collaboration, training and the like—that’s until it comes to time to share a presentation. Despite their popularity, only 2% of huddle spaces have a monitor to share presentations, which can only mean one thing—there are too many professionals whose meetings are being negatively impacted by their inability to quickly share a PowerPoint or visual collateral with their co-workers and clients. 

Now’s the time to utilize the spaces you already have and outfit them with the proper tools so they can transform into a more-productive huddle space when needed. Forum—an in-person interactive presentation software that works with no internet required—turns any space into a meeting place. By turning your laptop into a connected hub that instantly shares your presentation to anyone’s nearby device, the success of your meeting is no longer tethered to accessible WiFi, projectors, cables—or waiting for the conference room to open back up. Forum quickly creates a meaningful presentation setting on the fly, whether it’s an offsite vendor briefing at a restaurant or a quick brainstorming session about a next quarter ad buy in the lobby. By incorporating the devices your meeting attendees already use, everyone has a front-row seat to the presentation without having to crowd around a laptop or peer around someone’s head to see the quarterly numbers on the projector screen. 

Forum’s audience engagement features enhance the exchange and development of ideas too—the audience-polling feature allows the presenter to ask the meeting attendees questions that they can answer from their own device. It’s helpful when needing to make quick decisions as a group or determining where your co-workers stand on an idea in progress. The attendees can ask the presenter anonymous questions in return, which can strike new discussion topics among the group or allow them to work through the devil’s advocate perspectives in a neutral setting. The presenter can also live stream their desktop to the meeting attendee’s devices, allowing them to share an unreleased product video or work through next season’s budget in an Excel document in real-time.

Even though we’re working from home today, let’s be prepared to collaborate more effectively once we return to our offices. With all of us using online collaboration tools during this time, Forum will feel even more natural as a collaborative tool when your meetings become in-person again.

To learn more about Forum, book a demo today.