Hana, a wholly-owned subsidiary of CBRE, today announced that the company’s product council, ‘Hana Innovation Partners,’ (HIP) released the Ultimate Meeting Guide to safely and effectively bring employees back to the office for collaboration during the COVID-19 era and beyond. The meeting guide includes research and input from the council’s representatives, including Hana, Samsung, Herman Miller, Structure Tone and Muraflex.

A recent CBRE survey found that 82 percent of employees will favor buildings that offer shared meeting options, in addition to flexible space. As meeting and collaboration rooms continue to grow in demand, corporations should provide employees access to configurable meeting spaces that include in-person and virtual easy-to-use options while ensuring health and safety.

The Ultimate Meeting Guide focuses on four key pillars:

 

  1. Health & Safety: As the Ultimate Meeting Guide showcases, companies will need to educate and equip employees and collaboration spaces with tools and visual cues to create a healthy and comfortable environment.
  2. Collaboration & Communication: Working remote, at least part time, is here to stay. According to the guide, employees and organizations will need to account for meetings with remote attendees. Investments in technology solutions that enable connectivity between colleagues, both remote and in-person, will be critical for effective meetings.
  3. Configurable Meeting Spaces: In a post-COVID world, the office will evolve to become a hub for connectivity. The guide points to a variety of ways to help companies enable configurable meeting spaces to match each specific use case – from intuitive layouts to configurable partitions and furniture.
  4. Performance-Driven Design: The Ultimate Meeting Guide highlights that as remote work grows in demand, corporations will need to ensure employees’ time in-office is well spent by eliminating distractions, challenges with technology and ineffective workplace design.

“Flexibility in the way we use our spaces is key going forward,” said Robert Leon, Executive Vice President, Structure Tone. “From a construction perspective, this guide will give us a useful platform to have those discussions with our clients and design partners early in the process.”

“Samsung is proud to be one of Hana Innovation Partners during this critical moment in which we reimagine the future of work,” said Mark Quiroz, Vice President of Marketing, Samsung Electronics America. “We have been focused on helping companies build near- and long-term digital strategies to evolve the office into a collaboration hub with a suite of interactive and immersive technology solutions for the post-pandemic recovery period.”

Samsung and other technology vendors offer digital signage displays that enable companies to easily showcase and update workplace information for employees.

“Muraflex is proud to be a part of this collaboration that brings together key players in our industry to find solutions for the new office world,” said Fernando Petreccia, President and CEO, Muraflex. “With our partners offerings and our adaptable partitions, the Ultimate Meeting Guide presents how to create a safe, flexible and efficient work environment.”

“Access to meeting spaces that support the needs of users based on the activities they need to perform is more important now than ever,” stated Jeff Gibson, Vice President of Commercial Real Estate Sales, Herman Miller. “Our focus on the design of those spaces is key to providing great experiences.”

“As office workers want more choice in where and how they work, creating meeting spaces that enable a variety of use cases will be paramount,” explained Andrew Kao, Vice President of Product, Hana. “HIP’s Ultimate Meeting Guide provides tangible options for companies to implement in the short- and long-term.”

The full US report can be viewed here, and the UK report can be viewed here.