Smarter Meetings: Turning Interaction Into Action

By Sarah Drysdale, COO and Head of Product, CommBox

Welcome to Week 5 of our Collaboration Enabled Spaces series. So far, we have explored the role of interactive displays, room design, security, and the human side of collaboration.

This week focuses on a familiar workplace challenge. Meetings that feel productive in the moment but fail to translate into action.

A Collaboration Enabled Space should not just support discussion. It should help teams capture decisions, clarify next steps, and move work forward.

Why meetings often fall short

Most meetings generate ideas, feedback, and alignment. The problem is not the conversation. It is what happens next. Notes are scattered, actions are unclear, and decisions are remembered differently by different people.

When collaboration is visual and shared, outcomes become clearer. Interactive displays help teams move from talking to doing by making decisions visible and capture easy.

Using visual collaboration to clarify decisions

Interactive displays allow teams to build ideas together in real time. Whiteboarding, annotating documents, and marking up plans help groups reach agreement more efficiently.

When everyone can see the same information evolve on screen, there is less ambiguity. Decisions are documented as they happen rather than summarised later from memory.

On the CommBox Classic S5, teams can save whiteboards, annotated documents, and meeting notes at the end of a session and share them immediately. This creates a single source of truth for what was agreed.

Assigning ownership during the meeting

Action items are most effective when they are captured at the point of agreement. Interactive displays make this simple.

Teams can list tasks on screen, assign owners, and clarify deadlines while everyone is present. This avoids follow up emails and reduces misunderstandings.

Because the screen is shared, accountability is clear. Everyone leaves the room with the same understanding of what needs to happen next.

Supporting different working styles

Not everyone contributes in the same way. Some people speak up early. Others prefer to reflect and respond visually. Interactive displays support both styles.

Whiteboarding and annotation allow quieter team members to contribute by adding notes or marking up content. This leads to more balanced participation and better decisions.

The CommBox AI Toolkit on the S5 available on our Goanna firmware can also support meetings by helping teams generate visuals, clarify complex topics, or summarise discussion points during the session itself.

From meeting room to workflow

A Collaboration Enabled Space should connect smoothly to the tools teams already use. Saving outputs to shared drives, project platforms, or collaboration tools ensures that meeting outcomes flow directly into ongoing work.

When collaboration tools align with daily workflows, meetings stop being interruptions and start becoming accelerators.

Next week

In Week 6, we will explore how organisations can scale Collaboration Enabled Spaces across multiple rooms and locations while maintaining consistency, security, and ease of use.