Healthcare Organization Increases Remote and Onsite Collaboration with Next-Gen Meeting Rooms

Challenge

A national Healthcare Organization recognized that cross-team collaboration improves patient outcomes. To grow their collaborative culture, the Organization wanted to give employees engaging, seamless meeting experiences. It was important that employees focus on the purpose and outcomes from a meeting rather than meeting mechanics. Unfortunately, existing room configurations and legacy conferencing platforms stood in the way.  

The Organization set their sights on creating entirely fresh, next-generation meeting experiences at their global headquarters. These room experiences and capabilities would then serve as templates that could scale across other corporate sites and health clinics. 

WWT which had previously worked with the Organization to improve the patient experience by expanding and improving public Wi-Fi across more than 2,900 patient clinics and nine business offices in North America. Now they turned to WWT to enhance quality of care by focusing on employee experience. WWT worked from building a strategic roadmap through execution to realize their goal of empowering their workforce with next-generation collaboration capabilities.

Solution

WWT implemented a completely enhanced meeting experience for the Organization's 155 rooms at its global headquarters. Solutions were built for huddle spaces, small meeting rooms, medium conference rooms, large conference rooms and large training centers. 

The engagement began by WWT collaboration consultants leading an Envisioning Ideation Session to define the Organization's next-generation collaboration experience. Stakeholders identified that they needed collaboration solutions that satisfied more than a laundry list of technical requirements but also considered social, behavioral and perceptual elements.

The group defined a collective set of desired user behaviors and experiences across personas — teammate, guest teammate and visitor — that the Organization wanted to encourage and support with their next-generation meeting rooms. They then used these desired behaviors to identify functional characteristics that could be translated into technological requirements for their new collaboration platform. 

To meet the strategic goals, rooms needed to:

• Be easy to use.
• Deliver a consistent experience across phones, desktops and conference rooms.
• Support personalization and customization.
• Easy to find and reserve.
• Foster meeting equity so that in-person and remote participants can contribute with equal voice. 
• Empower employees to join and collaborate in meetings from anywhere, on any device.

To accomplish these objectives, WWT collaboration architects designed rooms that integrated Cisco Webex Room Kit with Solstice and Appspace. Rooms were outfitted with:

• Dual or single screens.
• A Cisco Touch 10 Control Panel.
• Wireless content sharing capabilities through Cisco Proximity.
• Content sharing via Solstice pods.
• Screens used as digital signage when rooms were not in use.
• On-demand scheduling outside rooms via iPad/Teem.
• Microsoft Outlook scheduling integration.
• HDMI connectivity.

The organization recognized that to attain their vision of an engaged and collaborative workforce they could not simply stop at deploying the new technology. They also needed to educate employees on how to use the new technology and incorporate it into their workflows. 

After successful deployment to the 155 rooms, WWT Adoption consultants provided end-user training to make sure employees were taking full advantage of room features. This included producing short how-to videos and quick reference guides for every room as well as holding virtual training sessions. 

Results

Knowledge workers at the headquarters quickly embraced the meeting room transformation. Within 12 months, the amount of collaboration meetings tripled, and meetings that used video and multi-point video doubled. The business has reduced travel costs and IT now spends fewer hours supporting AV systems. Thanks to taking a proactive approach to video meetings and end-user training, the company was quickly able to pivot to remote work and telehealth options following the COVID-19 outbreak so the organization could continue providing essential care. 

With standardized room configurations that can be deployed in 10 weeks, the organization is now looking to update rooms at their health clinics and other offices to enable hybrid work. This will allow corporate employees to connect seamlessly from home, in the office and everywhere in between, continuing the organization's goal of growing its collaborative culture and ultimately improving patient outcomes.