By Alice Chambers |
Businesses striving to bring employees back to the office must make the transition from remote to in-person work seamless. A frictionless experience fosters collaboration and productivity, making the commute worthwhile for employees.
“We’ve learned that in-person, face-to-face collaboration is incredibly effective, but when an employee walks through the entrance, they need to be as instantaneously productive as they are at their home workstation,” says Brad Hintze, executive vice president of global marketing at Crestron. “Is desk space easy to reserve and readily available? Are digital connections immediate and reliable? Starting the day with a call to the help desk is never good for the employee, their productivity, or the potential tenure of that employee.”
A well-designed workspace that integrates with advanced technologies can make all the difference to the employee’s overall experience. “If an employee can walk into the office and begin collaborating in a one-touch (or no-touch) manner with anyone in the world – seeing every gesture their remote colleague is making, and vice-versa – and if that workspace is as welcoming as the environment they’ve created at home, then you’ve made the commute worth it,” says Hintze. “Employees can work more effectively with seamless bring-your-own-device options, zero-latency audiovisual and unified communication solutions, excellent lighting and shading, the right climate, and furniture designed and arranged for both comfort and efficiency.”
At the same time, remote employees need to have an equally easy work set-up experience to their in-office colleagues.
“We speak a lot about high-impact spaces at Crestron – those big, complex rooms where important information is shared and vital decisions are made,” says Hintze. “Everyone needs to see and be seen, to hear and be heard. That’s why we’ve developed (and continue to refine) speaker-tracking cameras and systems that can follow a conversation around the room, constantly presenting the remote viewer with a head-on look at the individual who’s speaking, showing their every gesture and facial expression. The remote worker should feel as much a part of the ‘room’ as the in-person attendees.”
Creating a seamless meeting experience Crestron offers tools to help businesses improve the office and meeting experience with meeting solutions, including video conferencing, collaboration and presentation technologies. Attendees at the Crestron Masters event in Madrid, Spain, in May 2025 can get hands on training with these solutions. The new Crestron Modern Workplace Certification at that event will offer even more opportunities and a similar learning track will be available at InfoComm in Orlando, Florida, in June 2025.
“It’s an opportunity for workplace designers, salespeople, consultants and on-site IT and audiovisual professionals to learn how to create intuitive and user-friendly workspaces that enhance productivity and the employee experience,” says Hintze. “This includes room design, technology integration, and customising user interfaces.
“Without giving too much away, we’ll be featuring some pretty significant updates to our Automate VX multi-camera speaker solution,” says Hintze. “Beyond that, InfoComm will be a continuation of our approach to trade shows: It’s no longer about a collection of black boxes. It’s about what these systems and solutions can accomplish – working in concert with partners like Microsoft – and presenting that holistic experience to the attendees. We’ve been very focused on solutions that speak to our three biggest areas of expertise: content, collaboration and control, and we’ll be demonstrating our latest advances in all three of those areas.”
Integrating AI for the future of work
AI is set to play a key role in enhancing workplace efficiency, but organisations must be prepared to integrate it effectively.
“With all of the hype and popular culture drama that has traditionally surrounded AI – and some of the early results of its applications – we need to do some myth-busting,” says Hintze. “First, we need to understand this technology is in its infancy. When you first used dial-up internet, did you ever imagine having broadband on your phone? I don’t think many of us did, and that’s where we are with AI. In retrospect, future iterations will be so advanced that the current experience will seem utterly primitive.”
Hintze emphasises AI should be seen as an assistant, rather than a replacement, for employees. “It’s not going to replace you – AI is a true virtual assistant when it’s applied properly,” he says. “As we continue to develop AI agents, these solutions will become more helpful. Think of agents as specialists – we need them to handle specific tasks, from retrieving an email chain to creating lines of code. We’ll be able to converse with those agents in an increasingly natural manner until it’s as intuitive as asking a coworker to send you a document.
“It’s vital to mentally and culturally prepare for AI as a partner and not a replacement in the modern workplace. Those who can express the potential benefits of AI to their employees will be ahead of the game. People do their best work when they trust the available technology, and AI and its agents will soon be able to be a trustworthy virtual assistant that can handle a variety of mundane, time-consuming tasks, giving us more time to collaborate, ideate and create.”
Discover more insights like this in the Spring 2025 issue of Technology Record. Don’t miss out – subscribe for free today and get future issues delivered straight to your inbox.