Bring Your Own Meeting and drive a productive Digital Workplace Strategy

How you can improve workplace productivity? It has been an issue for many businesses, governments and organizations for years now. With new trends like remote working, flexible office designs, younger workforce entering business life, optimizing that productivity has becoming even more challenging.

The solution can be found in new technologies, the rise in digital tools might very well be the way forward you need. Embracing BYOM – Bring Your Own Meeting – will help drive your Digital workplace Strategy into a very efficient, effective future of work.

BYOD: old news?

Today we all bring several own devices to the office, ranging from laptops, tablets, mobile phones to smart watches. More and more we use these in our actual work life to share content and communicate with colleagues, partners or potential clients.

Back in 2010 BYOD was a ground-breaking acronym and phenomenon, launched by Intel. Their research¹ identified that “61% of Generation Y and 50% of 30+ workers believe the tech tools they use in their personal lives are more effective and productive than those used at work”.

Since then, the BYOD market has taken off and is set to hit almost $367 billion by 2022². 67% of people use their own devices at work³ and 87% of companies depend to some extent on their employees’ ability to access mobile business apps from their personal smartphones⁴.

Today BYOD is a key component of the Digital Workplace strategy of many enterprises. Providing “freedom of choice”, empowers employees and increases personal effectiveness and productivity. Being able to choose the devices they are most familiar and most competent with has given employees the confidence they need to save time and do more.

That BYOD increases productivity, might seem obvious today, but what is the next step to take?

Move over BYOD, here comes BYOM

With remote working and short, spontaneous huddle meetings on the rise, offering video and conferencing possibilities to employees has become a priority. A similar evolution as the one for BYOD, can be seen in the meeting room lately, where IT departments prefer standardization in the use of Unified Communication platforms, in uniform AV solutions for all their meeting rooms and in the installation of fully equipped conference rooms.

A rigid way of uniformization of audio and video calls resulted in long waiting times, bad connections, poor video quality, struggles to join meetings on different platforms, UC solutions which are not always compatible with the AV equipment in the room, difficulties to connect with an external UC solution (which is often different from the standard one used in a company)...

This approach clashes with what the users prefer. They are more productive when they use their own devices at work. They want to work with the technology of their choice, they avoid working with equipment that they don’t understand or find difficult to operate. They prefer conferencing solutions that appeal to them, are easy and intuitive to use.

Time for BYOM – Bring Your Own Meeting- a natural extension of BYOD, as it allows people to host a conference call using their preferred conferencing platform (e.g. Microsoft Teams, Webex, Zoom and many more) from their personal devices. And they choose to ignore the existing meeting room equipment provided to connect remote participants.

BYOM improves personal and group productivity and allows organizations to address different dimensions of a highly effective Digital Workplace strategy. Enterprises can

• Connect people. Get your teams together, worldwide. Anyone can meet, anywhere in the workplace
• Help a more diverse workforce, including contractors and interns, collaborate and contribute just as much as employees, without the need for training in advance
• Choose an own, versatile workstyle - when and where employees work, whether that’s in the coffee shop, at home or on the move
• Move around freely and use different workspaces for different tasks
• Be truly agnostic: own devices work seamlessly with existing AV equipment and UC solutions of choice

Embrace BYOM in your company

Deciding and implementing technology solutions that embrace BYOD and BYOM in an enterprise is the responsibility of an IT department. The challenge is to find those tools that fit within the budget, but that also give employees that same intuitive experience and that speed up business outcomes and productivity. Preferably fully secure, accessible one-fits-all solutions that don’t disrupt the employee experience and fully compatible with your existing IT infrastructure.

The success of your Digital Workplace strategy and the choice of your collaborative tools depends a great deal on putting the user at the center of the workflow. Only then will you be able to make effective use of your meeting room real estate and actually gain time.

ClickShare Conference offer wireless conferencing solutions that perfectly fit enterprises looking to improve their BYOD and BYOM experience.

Footnotes

1. Consumerization: What is in Store for IT? - Intel and Maritz July 2010
2. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) Market - Global Market Insights Inc. March 2016
3. BYOD alert: Confidential data on personal devices - CBS News September 2013
4. BYOD Usage in the Enterprise - Syntonic Summer 2016