A Flexible Future Requires Flexible Furniture

Before COVID-19 changed our world forever, people did not have a choice about working from an office or attending a class in school. Universities had a brief fascination with the MOOC, Massive Open Online Coursesas an educational panacea, but student performance in those classes rarely equated to earning a degree. Hopes for the potential of transformative online education were tempered. Pre-pandemic, in-person events dominated occasions for gathering, from business conferences to university classes. Collaboration and conferencing in-person were requisite.

Enter a new virus, in a globalized world woefully unprepared to rein in a galloping rampage of disease. Since March of 2020, meeting platforms such as Zoom, Teams and Go To Meeting have stood in for office and school facilities with real time virtual meetings and classes.Sadly, despite being 20% through the 21st century, most virtual online experiences were not interactive, especially during peak COVID times. Synchronous and asynchronous alike, “digital learning” exacerbated inequities, swallowed mentorship opportunities, and fractured cohesive in-person social networks where inclusion, collaboration and inspiration fostered positive outcomes.

Kay Anderle, a founding partner of Keller Anderle LLP, began he rquest for the perfect hybrid meeting room setup by investigating infrastructure that would support a new mode of working. She started by converting unused floor space into a conference room and then began researching the best equipment for hybrid meetings. She knew that AV systems and conference tables would accommodate the equipment needed for hybrid zoom meetings and support “the new way of lawyering.” She then had to figure out how to manage a hybrid conference, and fortunately, remote work was compatible with the court system.

A well-designed office meeting space or classroom creates an experience with live energy where learning, coaching, mentoring generates creativity, collaboration and problem solving. While many do not want to return to the office or classroom, the hybrid meeting solution provides the flexibility to be virtual and in person simultaneously. Here is a case study of an organization that rapidly shifted gears during the height of the pandemic, and successfully transitioned to a hybrid meeting setup in a newly designed and provisioned conference training center:

Keller Anderle LLP is a leading, woman-owned law firm based in Californiaand specializes in all types of business litigation. When the entire legal system, including courts, shut down because of COVID-19, their business model had to change overnight. Everything went remote, including hearings, depositions, and mediations, all conducted via Zoom. Before March 2020, all appearances took place in-person, and then they did not.

As Kay considered how best to build a sustainable mode of hybrid meetings, she realized that collaborative tables would expand upon the advanced AV system and the technology needed for a hybrid meeting. Anderle’s task was to build a workflow where a team of lawyers in one room could collaborate with another team of lawyers across the country. When considering which technology is mainly used for virtual meetings, she settled on an AV system designed so each workstation can share a document with any other workstation, enabling real-time collaboration. By providing three large monitors to the examining lawyer, a team of supporting lawyers can quickly send sources over to the one asking questions. The opposing counsel and deponent can be projected onto one of the big monitors on the wall via Zoom. It was a recipe for success. Keller Anderle LLP lawyers can now meet in their new conference room, while the opposition is free to meet in a different physical location and use the Internet to conference into the deposition: the essence of a hybrid meeting.

According to Kay, a successful interaction with the witness allows screen sharing, which is equipment needed for a hybrid zoom meeting. Using their custom collaborative table from SMARTdesks®, lawyers around the table can each share supporting documents to one of the three monitors on the main examiner’s screen. Since all documents are in the cloud and the AV system at the table logs right into the system, every workstation allows lawyers to send documents to the main examiner or to pop them up on the wall screens.

After two years of hybrid work styles, it is safe to say that elements of remote work are here to stay. Collaborative furniture, when coupled with a state-of-the art AV system, are the secret to what makes hybrid meetings effective. SMARTdesks® hybrid work furniture allows users to fold monitors down when not in use, and can pop them up if needed.

In Kay’s words, “Having a dedicated conference room that can be used as a regular conference room and then as a collaborative table is key. Businesses will take up less space post-COVID, but I think that law firms need an excellent AV system setup. You could get away without it before, but not now. Remote work was a big question mark but having the right equipment in place makes it possible.”