
As the coronavirus pandemic eases, it’s clear that hybrid work is here to stay in many industries, and workers prefer hybrid setups. The 2021 Accenture Future of Work Study found that 83 percent of respondents said a hybrid setup would be best for them.
As organizations adopt hybrid models where some workers are in the office and others work remotely, they need to ensure that the meetings they run are productive and useful for as many workers as possible, not only in the office.
Unlike the first months of the pandemic, when most employees who could work from home did so, and everyone had to fight the same videoconferencing issues, hybrid setups introduce more various issues around meetings, said Scott Wharton, vice president and general manager of Logitech’s video collaboration group. People who are out of office tend to feel left out for a variety of reasons.
For example, there might be a dozen people in a meeting in an office and another dozen participating from home. Those far away often can’t see or hear what’s going on in the room, and that’s “not quite the same as if they were participating” in person, Wharton said. There may be a camera or a laptop with a webcam placed in the front of the room. If someone is drawing on a whiteboard, those tuning in further away may not be able to see the material easily.
How can businesses overcome these shortcomings?
“You’re going to have to move to some professional-grade equipment, and it’s not going to be in the boardroom like it was in the first pandemic,” Wharton said. “It should be everywhere.”
Tech Needs to Improve Hybrid Meetings
Organizations can use different hardware and software to make hybrid meetings more fair and inclusive, according to Wharton and other industry experts.
One of the first aspects to discuss is audio quality, said Bob Frisch and Cary Green, the founding and managing partners, respectively, of the Strategic Offsites Group, which facilitates strategy conversations for executive teams. and board.
“To avoid a last-minute scramble due to poor audio, make sure the room has high-quality microphones so remote participants can hear,” they wrote in the Harvard Business Review. “If you’re in a hotel or other temporary meeting space and multiple microphones aren’t a viable option, consider augmenting your audio input by passing personal attendees a handheld microphone to hasn’t spoken yet.”
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It’s not enough to have a microphone in the center of the room, says Wharton, who points to Logitech’s Rally products, which offer microphones that can be placed around a room to improve audio quality.
Another tool that organizations can use is software that includes artificial intelligence to automatically recognize who is speaking and zoom in on that person. Wharton also encourages organizations to think beyond having just one camera to create a deeper experience.
“The model for us is not Silicon Valley, but more Hollywood or big games, that if you think about watching a big sporting event, it’s not a camera and a remote control and move it, ” he said. “There were, like, 40 cameras, and there was a smart director and they knew where to put the camera at the right time.”
Organizations should also take steps to ensure whiteboards and collaboration screens can be easily shared with those not in the room, Wharton said. They can use dedicated whiteboard cameras that can sit on the wall and capture what someone is writing and share it in a Zoom or Microsoft Teams meeting, or they can use digital whiteboards that are specially built into the collaboration platforms such as Cisco’s Webex.
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Make sure employees feel part of the meeting
Experts say it is important for organizations to use technology to make remote employees in a meeting feel like they are seen and that their presence is felt in the room.
For example, Frisch and Green say, an organization might place a large screen in the middle of a room and then two additional large monitors on either side of the room that “show panes of ‘life’ size’ of distant participants for the duration of the meeting.”
“We found that these large images help attendees accept remote partners as full participants and provide a constant reminder to include them in the conversation,” they wrote. “Also, if possible the voices of remote participants should come from the same monitors as their faces – ceiling speakers tend to reinforce the artificial atmosphere.”
The goal of technology is to ensure that no individual or small group dominates discussions and decision-making, Wharton said. “I think we all know from research, it shows that when you have a diverse team, you’re more likely to make better decisions,” he added.