How To Make Your Hybrid Meetings Seamless

In our post pandemic work world, we all have heard the term “hybrid” used to describe various aspects of our return to work environments. Most commonly referring to the balance between working from home and working in office. A vast majority of companies returning to in-office work are adopting hybrid work models allowing for employees to work part of their week in the office and part of their week from home. The exact days could be determined by managers or may be entirely up to the employee. Regardless, this will inevitably lead to scheduled meetings where some of the participants will be in office and some of the participants will be attending virtually. These meetings are coming to be known as hybrid meetings. Whether you’ve heard the term or not its likely that you’ve participated in these types of meetings and experienced the headaches that hybrid meetings can cause without proper technology in place.

Lets paint the picture. You and your in office co-workers walk into a conference room for a meeting where some participants will be joining from home. There’s a conference phone on the table, a camera at one end of the room by the monitor, and hdmi hookups to share content on the table. You’re using zoom for the meeting and realize you want everybody that’s in the conference in one camera frame and to be heard clearly in one audio stream. So you want to use the conference phone and camera for the meeting. The problem is there’s 1 minute until the meeting and you aren’t sure how to connect. Ultimately you decide to join the meeting separately from your laptops and mute all the microphones except for one persons, completely minimizing the value of the in person meeting experience and having poor microphone coverage for everyone in the conference room.

This is where a room system with simple joining interface or a bring your own device (BYOD) setup with clear connections for personal devices would save the hybrid meeting experience. All of the major video collaboration platforms such a Microsoft, Zoom, and GoTo have partnered with hardware manufacturers to develop excellent room system hardware with bring your own device flexibility.  There are all-in-one video soundbars like the Poly Studio X or Logitech Rally series that deliver everything you need for video meetings in one singular device for smaller meeting spaces or enterprise room systems like the Poly G7500 or Microsoft MTR Kits that allow for multiple cameras and microphones for large meeting spaces or training rooms. These systems are purpose-built and powerful and totally flexible to integrate with multiple collaboration software.

Please let us know if you have any questions or if you would like to learn more. We pride ourselves on our extensive video conferencing experience. Give us your room size, budget, and preferences. We can give you the best options for your room. Let us do the work.