I thought of our training room and meeting room tools
the same way. They weren’t icing on the cake - they were the
cake! My colleagues and I had grown dependent upon them as
these tools had become integral to the way we performed our
work. This dependency helped paved the way for an upgrade
in 2016.
As the primary users of the training rooms, my team and
I were heavily involved in discussions with IT and facilities
about the 2016 upgrade. We discussed how we performed our
work, our current pain points, our ideas for future work and
opportunities, and our ideas for better efficiency and effective-
ness. These rooms were also heavily used for meetings with
employees, vendors and other stakeholders so we incorporat-
ed ideas from some of those key users as well.
My employees, and virtually every employee who partici-
pated in training, discussions, problem solving or information
sharing within these rooms, knew that easy and high quality
video and audio was a must. We had experienced firsthand
the positive difference in engagement and learning when both
verbal and nonverbal communication cues are available to
everyone. We had grown to depend upon it and we weren’t
about to give that up when upgrading the rooms! Instead,
we asked that this type of communication be enabled in all
rooms.
Some of our previous rooms were equipped with inter-
active boards. While they were daunting at first, we quickly
22 July 2017
realized that we simply needed to treat them like huge com-
puter screens. We could then share documents, files, websites,
etc. during our training sessions and meetings. It seems silly
now but at the time, we were so amused by how these simple
things made our work and our discussions occur more easily.
We advocated for interactive panels and collaborative/sharing
software capabilities in the upgraded rooms as well.
We worked collaboratively with both IT and Facilities to
discuss and identify what the upgrade would entail. We were
lucky. We had in-house staff who had expertise and shoul-
dered much of the burden regarding telecom, network sup-
port, etc. Therefore, Credit Union 1 worked seamlessly with
our AV consultant to design and install the new tools.
We worked closely with our consultant to test and train
on the new system. Through “train the trainer” sessions, we
received hands-on application and development so we could
use the equipment to its full capabilities. My team became the
power users and began modeling the use of the technology
numerous times a week. Because the entire workforce was an
audience for my team’s services, they all got to see how every-
thing worked. Employees started to show interest in using the
equipment, and momentum grew throughout the workforce.
One example of how the excitement built around the or-
ganization was on the simplest of features: the ability to email
hand written notes from the interactive display as a PDF.
Who would have guessed how excited people could be