The lines between physical and virtual are blurring. This is more than evident in the world of business, where digital signage is becoming the go to approach in handling meetings rooms and office spaces.
According to Futuresource Consulting, there are nearly 11 million meeting rooms in Western Europe and North America alone. Now just imagine how mindbogglingly colossal the number of actual meetings must be. So in order to facilitate the organizational needs of such a vast corporate environment, the last decade has seen an unprecedented amount of digital display solutions sprout out on the market.
However, meeting the sheer demand for their gadgets isn’t the only challenge facing providers. One of the main issues is the simple yet most relevant question of space. Namely, where to install the device to best assuage the needs of its end-users and help boost their work efficiency.
Location, location, location.
Small meeting rooms, for instance, sitting up to 6 people, account for 49% of meeting rooms in the West, and Futuresource’s research has shown that 20% of meetings are being held in non-traditional areas such as kitchens, breakout spaces, receptions, and foyers. Here is where the practical aspect of thin, e-paper devices like Joan comes into play. With their cordless feature and sleek elegant design, they can be fitted anywhere, be it official or unofficial gathering points.
We could even go as far as to designate a water cooler conversation area as a mini conference room. Or as Anthony Brennan, Research Analyst at Futuresource, said most correctly: “It is about the blending together of both physical and digital to foster synthesis and innovation in the workspace. This is critical for employee success, which is in turn key to business accomplishment, and firms realize this.”
Killing time when there’s no time to kill.
It was predicted that 2018 would be a golden era of digital signage. They were right. Office life is becoming more integrated, comprehensive and faster. This means building communities by personalizing communications and making the latter as convenient and speedy as possible is the future of any and every company. The less time you spend booking rooms, organizing invite emails, event updates, etc., the faster you get down to the job at hand.
With the accelerating pace of real-life vocations, our virtual existence has no choice but to keep up. There’s a growing preference for creating communications that slice through the huge amount of information flowing around us. Research shows that millennials, soon to be the biggest segment of the workforce, dislike direct communication and waiting around. They prefer more indirect approaches in the form of clear-cut messages and on-the-spot visual confirmation. And digital signage kills both of those birds with one state-of-the-art screen.
A green affordable luxury.
Beyond the aforementioned benefits, institutions are discovering two other advantages: digital door displays can cut expenses and improve the environment. Forget plasma, LED or LCD — the greenest and cheapest leap forward is e-paper technology. Why? It lasts incomparably longer in terms of shelf and battery life. Thankfully, environmentally friendly practices are becoming borderline obligatory, so the ability to deliver information quickly and at the same time eliminate a significant amount of paper-based communication is or soon will be crucial.
Love it or loathe it, technology is walking hand in hand with how we communicate and organize ourselves. It’s, therefore, safe to say that digital signs are outgrowing the word trend and are tipping into the category of basic necessities. To borrow the famous words of sociologist Martha Becks, “The way we do anything is the way we do everything,’’ we in the meeting room booking business are doing everything to help you do anything flexibly, ecologically and punctually.