Lake|Flato Architects saves 100 hours a week by consolidating on Zoom Workplace

Lake|Flato Architects are nationally recognized for their ability to root modern, environmentally responsible buildings in their place and seamlessly merge them with their surroundings.

As a forward-looking firm, Lake|Flato understood the growing demand for a more modern workplace that doesn’t tie them to a cubicle. They challenged themselves to design the workplace of the future—one that would use best-in-class tech and provide an outstanding user experience no matter where workers are located.

And they would use their own office as an example.

“We decided to fully embrace a hybrid work model with roughly a 50/50 split between office and work-from-home. We would have fewer desks in the office than people,” says Dan Stine, Director of Design Technology, Lake|Flato.

Supporting a hybrid workforce can pose challenges for any type of business, but for an architecture and planning firm, the challenges are even greater given the creative and collaborative nature of the work. “We’re architects, so we’re always thinking graphically and wanting to draw on everything,” explains Dan.

Originally, Lake|Flato used Miro as a whiteboard drawing tool, but it was a standalone tool, and not everyone at the firm had a license.

Dan and his team also wanted a tech solution that would be easy to access and use from anywhere, even as users change location.

To put their ideas to the test, the firm completely remodeled their office building, transforming it into a showcase of environmental sustainability, creative design, and inclusivity.

The team converted each conference room into a Zoom Room, with one touchscreen display for content and another non-touch display for participants. Zoom Rooms bring HD video collaboration into the office and at home, enabling in-person and remote participants to interact easily and consistently.

“Anytime you need to share content, it’s always the same thing. You have your tablet, you join the Zoom meeting, and you share content—whether you’re in the office’s courtyard, the conference room, your desk, your home, or in a coffee shop,” says Dan.

Zoom Rooms put everyone on equal footing. People can participate in meetings easily—no matter where they are located.

Dan also likes that Zoom Rooms are an open ecosystem that works equally well with other video meeting platforms, such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, and Google Meet. Every meeting starts simply with the click of the “start meeting” button.

In addition, all desks are wireless with the office redesign, eliminating the need for a keyboard, mouse, and even HDMI cables. Everything is portable, and everyone has a tablet and their own Zoom license. People can even change location mid-meeting and stay in the Zoom meeting without missing a beat.

Dan estimates the firm saves 100 hours a week by not subjecting employees to multi-step equipment setups and eliminating the need to log in and out every time they change location during a meeting.

Even outside guests, such as consultants and clients, can easily join Zoom calls when visiting the Lake|Flato office.

“They expect us to hand them an HDMI cable, but all they need to do is open their Zoom app and click the share button—and it works flawlessly.”

When the conference rooms at Lake|Flato are idle between meetings, their marketing department uses the Digital Signage displays as a new marketing channel. Dan explains:

“Some of our conference rooms are right on the sidewalk with floor-to-ceiling windows. People walk down the street and see all these cool images of our projects on the displays in the empty conference room.”

The marketing team can also quickly swap out the content to feature special events, keeping it hyper-relevant.

With Zoom Rooms in place, Dan and his team quickly saw the value of adopting the Zoom Whiteboard feature. It’s now something every team member uses almost daily.

Dan also uses the AI features of Zoom Whiteboard to help prepare presentations and training.

“Just recently I asked the AI to brainstorm ideas on a specific niche topic that I was going to develop some training for. It gave me ideas I hadn’t thought of,” says Dan.

While Dan had to finetune the AI-generated ideas, he estimates the AI got him 75% of the way there.

Early in the transition, Lake|Flato used Microsoft Teams Phone but switched to Zoom Phone once they saw the benefit of consolidating cloud VoIP functionality onto the Zoom Workplace platform. 

“Zoom was cheaper than Teams, which is one of the reasons we switched away from Microsoft Teams Phones to Zoom Phones. But more importantly, when you’re consolidated on Zoom, your Zoom Phone won’t ring when you’re in a meeting,” says Dan. “It knows that you’re busy so the phone won’t disrupt you.” 

Instead, Dan uses the voicemail transcripts that come with Zoom Phone to see whether he needs to return a call immediately or not.

“While you’re in a meeting and you see you’ve missed a call, you can click on it and, without having to listen to it, see who called and what it’s about—and do a little triage in the moment. Do you need to step out of a meeting because it’s a big deal or can it wait?”

Lake|Flato also uses Zoom’s built-in AI assistant, AI Companion, to find new efficiencies in their processes, from meeting summaries to meeting questions, which offer “catch me up” functionality. AI Companion is included at no additional cost with the paid services assigned to Zoom accounts.

Dan estimates that he was spending 15 minutes taking notes for every one-hour meeting and another 15 minutes cleaning up his notes afterward—a task made redundant with AI Companion. Given that Dan spends about 12 to 15 hours in meetings every week, that’s around six to eight hours saved every week.

“There are some time savings, which is great, but the ability to focus on a project and be more present and accountable to your peers is also pretty important,” says Dan. “It’s also easy to find your notes because they’re always in the same location.”

Dan also uses the meeting questions feature in Zoom Meetings. If he’s running late or is multitasking, he can press the “catch me up” button to get a concise summary of what’s happened in the call so far, ask to see whether his name has been mentioned, and get a quick overview of the main takeaways.

Dan looks forward to utilizing the Zoom Workplace platform even more in the future. He’s particularly interested in leveraging Zoom Sessions for thought leadership events, with its registration and advanced reporting capabilities.

“We want to use Zoom Sessions to continue to foster our position in the industry as a thought leader. Being able to host our own events on Zoom is going to be really amazing,” says Dan.

Lake|Flato’s expanding use of Zoom demonstrates the benefit of having so much functionality built into one platform.