Improved technology could make meetings more productive

New research has revealed that 82% of European business leaders think that the right technology would make meetings more productive.

The Barco survey polled over 1,300 business leaders on their attitudes towards the efficiency of meetings, and found that managers want an easy way to connect mobile devices to their conference room presentation system. Other ideas for improving efficiency included easy connection from the participants’ seats and faster start-up times.

The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend is quickly gaining importance, as many managers increasingly want to use their smartphone or tablet to show content on the large meeting room screen. However, using mobile devices easily and conveniently remains something of a challenge. While 73% of European managers think it would be useful to be able to share content from their tablets or smartphones, only 14% can actually do this in a comfortable way today.

Of the countries surveyed, the UK is the best equipped technologically: 83% of the managers use laptops to share information in meeting rooms, 53% use tablets, and even smartphones (41%) are no longer an exception. However, being an early adopter also entails a number of risks. For example, IT has to intervene in UK meetings much more often than in the rest of Europe (half as often) or North America (only a third as often). So, the key to success is not technology alone – users also need it to be fail-safe.

Although the use of technology has increased over the past year, in 61% of the companies there is still room for improvement. In particular, business leaders are calling for:

• Collaboration solutions that make it easy to share visuals/information from different computers during the meeting
• Meeting software in which participants enter their comments and ideas during the meeting so that they can be projected afterwards
• Video conference solutions
• Collaboration solutions that make it easy to share visuals/information from different tablets or smartphones during the meeting.