Rethinking your ideal home office-boardroom experienc
Employees spend countless hours in their home offices, glued to the screen on endless online virtual meetings. Sound familiar? Buying a comfortable, ergonomic chair or upgrading your desk is a prerequisite, however, there are other key areas where you can elevate your home/remote office experience. How can you keep virtual meetings productive? How do you keep engagement high when everyone’s behind their screen? What is the right set up to make every virtual engagement impactful and memorable?  

Forget the Home Office. How about a Home Boardroom! 

Home offices have as many negative connotations as positive. Essential for some, impossible and ‘over-rated’ for others. Maintaining professionalism and figuring out ways to communicate while transitioning to this home boardroom will be crucial for home office workers, hence a new set-up is required. 
Always treat the ‘Home Boardroom’ as a professional space where you can ‘virtually’ invite your peers, partners, and customers, brainstorm ideas together, make decisions, and even close deals! Travel is no longer required where you can save costs, have a better balance, and embrace the benefits and flexibility of the hybrid environment. 
The need to reinvent the concept of remote meetings is critical. Existing video conferencing tools have not changed in decades. Every platform is identical in capabilities with minor tweaks here and there but none of them offer anything significantly more than simple screen sharing and camera sharing. If businesses are going to foster a remote team culture that results in efficiencies, better software is required to allow everyone to express their vision, visualize their ideas, and allow them to be as creative remotely as if they were face-to-face in the same room. 

Elevate the Home Boardroom with Interactive Whiteboards 

Make meetings fun again! Interactive Whiteboards can transform your home office into a home boardroom for any virtual meeting. The key element is ease-of-use. Implementing user-friendly Interactive Whiteboards along with intuitive collaboration software that people actually want to use increases engagement, which makes meetings more efficient and productive. With the right hardware and software combination, you can: 
– Stand in front of your data and information which changes your energy during your next virtual presentation 
Immerse your audience into your presentation and make them feel like you’re standing in front of them even in a hybrid meeting 
Use your body language and gestures like pointing at your content to make a point to maintain energy and keep engagement 

The Secret to Facilitating Fluid Virtual Collaborations 

If your audience engages with you much more actively during the virtual session and remembers the information you are giving them, the results will be clear. The secret to this success is in creating a seamless, virtual ‘collaboration’ experience in real-time as if everyone is in the same room. 
Let’s look at some tips on how to configure your ideal home office/boardroom. 
Interactive Whiteboard – Invest in a high-performance board designed to let you write naturally. You need to be able to move objects with your finger, write with a stylus and easily erase without having to fumble with buttons and menus. Low latency interactive whiteboards will truly give that pen on paper experience crucial for fluid virtual meetings. Fit matters! Consider the right size of Interactive Whiteboard suitable for your home office – this will eliminate having screens that are too small or too overpowering for your home workspace. 
Collaboration Software – Go way beyond “am I sharing my screen?”! Leverage a unique software platform that revolutionizes the way users connect, share documents, and consume content – regardless of where the meeting participants are located. Now the presenter can create, present, explain, mark up, refine on the fly, and summarize – as if all the meeting attendees are right there in the same room. Check out this powerful yet easy-to-use collaboration software in action. Watch Video  
– Camera – Place the camera in front of you capturing both you and the interactive whiteboard. It’s critical that your audience sees you point, gesture, and interact with the data/information. 
Audience Monitor – Set up a 23.8”-27” monitor facing you so that you can see your audience. This will allow you to turn to the Interactive Whiteboard, write and work, and quickly turn back to face your audience and see them react live for the closest thing to being there!  
Remote work is here to stay. To reap the rewards of this transition, businesses will need to find a new balance. This balance must consider the need for social interactions, create an environment where engagement is cultivated between remote workers, and allow remote teams to not only engage with each other, but be creative – as if they were all in the same room. 
Looking for more insights? Explore Ricoh’s Communication and Collaboration Solutions.  
Find out how easy it is to bring your remote meetings to life. This easy-to-use collaboration tool can instantly elevate your presence and make meetings more productive and impactful. Start your free 30-day trial of Reactiv SUITE Pro today.