The way it will take shape may still be uncertain, but one thing is fairly certain. Hybrid working will continue to be with us in the future. Gartner expects the proportion of face-to-face meetings in companies to fall from 60 to 25 percent by 2024 – and attributes this primarily to remote working and changing demographics (high proportion of millenials in the working population). It can be assumed that in the future, too, there will often be at least one remote call partner.
As more and more workplaces become hybrid in this respect, meeting rooms must support interoperability. It is important that meeting rooms are compatible with different solutions (MS Teams, Zoom, Cisco Webex, etc.).
BYOM is the new BYOD
Bring-your-own-meeting (BYOM) is a natural evolution of bring-your-own-device (BYOD). You use your own laptop or tablet etc. to hold a video conference and can use your preferred video conferencing platform (Teams, Zoom, Webex ). At the same time, you benefit from the existing infrastructure of the conference room – i.e. the available audio and video equipment. You connect wirelessly with your device to the meeting room screen.
Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams and Zoom, for example, offer wireless authentication methods that automatically identify the employee using the digital twin in the UCC client. For example, if an employee comes into the meeting room with their smartphone, they can transfer their conversation directly to the room systems for convenient continuation.
What makes BYOM and BYOD so popular with employees?
Quite simple really, humans are creatures of habit. As early as 20210, Intel noted in a study that 60 percent of Generation Y (people born between 1980 and the late ’90s) and 50 percent of those in their thirties believed that the technology tools they used privately were more effective and useful than those they used at work. Most people in the pandemic designed video conferences from their own laptops in the home office, got used to using them and the tools via their own computers, and therefore also often preferred a solution that was intuitive and easy for them to use.
