Nokia meeting rooms

In one of the university courses we had to make several visits to various companies both primarily local ones and ones with international background. In these visits we were concentrating mostly on how cultural differences are being dealt with in those companies and in case of local companies how they are keeping the local spirit and traditions.

One of our visits was to Nokia premises in Hervanta. We have seen a presentation about the corporate culture and what is being done to increase the productivity of the company's employees. One of very important innovations that we were told about was Nokia teleconferencing solution. While developing this solution Nokia engineers were collecting the opinions of the people who have used teleconferencing a lot and were implementing their suggestions while also testing new approaches.

The design they came up with was with a set of big screens in which you could see the people you have a conference with sitting behind a desk as if they were actually sitting in front of you. The presenter explained to us that this approach helped create the feeling of the real meeting which you don't get if you're just seeing a person's head on a computer screen. After some time you would actually feel that you've known the people you're chatting with for a long time, these meetings provide far more information than the usual meeting solutions can give.

References:

http://conversations.nokia.com/2008/06/06/halo-youre-my-hero/