By David Aarons, Senior Vice President of AFD Contract Furniture
Business in the 21st century is being built on a foundation of instantaneous communications. Success and failure in today’s commercial landscape is becoming increasingly dependent on companies’ ability to coordinate and leverage their assets at a moment’s notice. For a company with multiple offices spread across different time zones, this means finding a way to bring all key employees into a single room when split second decisions are made. To achieve this level of collaboration, more and more companies are turning to advanced telecommunications to keep their workforce on the same page, a step ahead of the competition.
Evolution of Business Meetings
The jet age is behind us; reliance on air travel for interoffice collaboration is costly, inefficient and far too slow for the pace of business. Furthermore, occasional meetings between colleagues from different geographies, even when coupled with regular telephone correspondence, simply cannot produce the same quality teamwork as two employees in the same room. As a result, companies with offices located throughout the globe have found that telepresence systems can not only provide the quickest, cheapest and most practical way of bringing employees together for meetings but also enable distant colleagues to virtually work side by side on daily projects.
Consolidate Your Workforce
Over the past decade, trends in workspace management have precipitated a comprehensive restructuring of office design. Spurred on by the notion that improved collaboration begets increased productivity, countless companies have made the transition to workspace layouts conducive to group work. The most forward-thinking of these companies have taken this philosophy a step further, addressing the need for continuous communication between colleagues at separate office locations.
Unlike conference telephone calls or even video conferencing services such as Skype, cutting edge telepresence systems can establish a sustained correspondence between multiple offices that essentially brings a team under one giant roof. With high definition cameras and monitors positioned adjacent to workspaces, colleagues from thousands of miles away can appear to be working in the same room. Often termed “wormholes,” in reference to the science fiction concept of passageways through time and space, these real-time links are revolutionizing the way companies do business.
Getting Up to Speed
When your business is ready to transform its approach to interoffice collaboration, AFD Contract Furniture (AFD) is ready to supply the workstations. One of the largest full service furniture management companies in the nation, AFD works with clients to develop and implement cost-effective, productive and operationally efficient furniture solutions to meet a wide variety of business objectives, including interoffice communications.
AFD has been assisting companies to develop custom solutions tailored to individual needs for each office location. Alternatively, AFD’s online shopping cart provides companies the option to order pre-selected standards, which can be formatted as individual products, complete offices, individual workstations or workstation clusters, allowing for the coordinated configuration of all office locations. Whatever your demands, AFD can help you build a network of uniformly efficient offices in which workers can collaborate with peers from around the globe.
