We spend most of our waking hours at work, so our work environment should be a place to foster creativity, community and collaboration.
I read a lot these days about new trends in workplace design. Traditional spaces with corridors of closed doors or high-walled cubes have been shunned by younger companies and the tech community who moved to open floor plans long ago. I still remember the first time I walked into an HP building and looked out across a football field’s worth of desks and people without a wall or divider in sight.
Hoteling is another trend. Companies design their offices with a limited number of “assigned seats.” You come to work and find a spot and put your personal effects in a locker. Such an approach optimizes costs. Not everyone is in the office everyday, so why pay for unused floor space? It also allows you to interact with a different set of people each time you’re in the office.
Larger companies are using smaller satellite offices within close proximity of HQ in major metro areas to allow folks to cluster in a workplace without bearing the brunt of a punishing commute.
Enter The Cloud
One of the more interesting trends I am seeing is how companies are extending their physical workplaces to the cloud. Bridging the Physical and the Virtual is the tag I use for this. Even with the innovative trends listed above, a physical space is still very expensive (no matter what size) and are hard to reconfigure when your needs change. And of course the elephant in the room is that your employees are now scattered all over the planet and co-locating everyone physically is just not possible.
Bridging the Physical and Virtual
Here is how our customers are creating this Physical/Virtual bridge with Sococo.
Take a (physical) conference room or common area.
Equip it with a big visible display (BVD). Power it with a Mac Mini or any PC or laptop along with an inexpensive camera/mic/speaker setup. Or get one of the fully integrated touch displays like the one shown above.
Create a Sococo account for the display that represents the physical room it’s in.
Log in and leave it on all the time…
In the Sococo Virtual Office, rename the (virtual) room to the same name as the Physical Room with the BVD.
That’s it!
Now your physical Conference room has been virtualized. It’s always on. It’s always there and available for anyone in your organization regardless of their physical location.
If it’s a common area, your remote employees can pop into the virtual room and peer into the physical room. Have an ad hoc conversation with the folks that are there. Feel more connected to the organization.
If it’s a conference room, you can list the room in your scheduling system. Invite folks the the Oak Conference room and they can show up virtually or in person. It doesn’t matter. If you walk into the physical room, all you have to do is talk and your voice is projected to the virtual participants via the BVD.
Bridging the physical and the virtual is a great way to build a stronger corporate culture by fostering collaboration and creating a feeling of connectedness for all your employees… regardless of their physical location.
