The Hybrid Meeting Room

26 Jun The Hybrid Meeting Room

Posted at 08:35h in Hybrid Meetings by Simon Spencer

In this article, we will go over the ins and outs of an effective hybrid meeting room, and let you know everything you’ll need to get started with hosting your own hybrid meetings.

Elements of an Effective Hybrid Meeting

A hybrid meeting is very different from a fully physical meeting. After all, instead of being in the same room, people will be attending from miles away from each other and communicating through the internet. This is why you must ensure your hybrid meeting is as effective as possible — to bridge the gap between a physical meeting and a hybrid one.

Here are some of the most vital elements of a successful and effective hybrid meeting —

Visibility: Your remote participants should feel active in participating in the meeting. To help with this, you must ensure that all remote participants are featured prominently within the meeting with considerations made for quality audio and video.
Participation: Ensuring that remote participants remain engaged and participate is vital. By asking questions directly to the participants who are remotely engaging, and ensuring that their viewpoints are heard, you can create a balanced environment for in-person participants and remote participants to take part.
Reliability and Stability: Your hybrid setup needs to be consistently able to provide a great experience for remote participants. This means a reliable and stable internet connection and using equipment that is of a high enough standard.

Ultimately, you need to ensure that you can take advantage of the benefits of the hybrid meeting whilst also ensuring remote participants aren’t left to the wayside.

Essential Equipment for a Hybrid Meeting Room

Your equipment is vital for a hybrid meeting room. After all, your equipment will decide the quality of your meetings.

It’s so important to ensure you have the right equipment, and that you have the top-of-the-line equipment to make your meetings as high quality as possible.

Audio

A good speaker setup will ensure that everyone joining remotely will be able to be heard properly by everyone in the room. After all, there’s no point in running a meeting where half of the participants simply can’t participate.

The best solution for this is using conference desk speakers. These will allow you to lay speakers on the desk throughout the room, distributed evenly so everyone can hear them online.

You can also use a larger speaker at the front of the room, near the screen, to further help with this.

Microphones

Just like you’ll need to hear your other participants, they’ll also need to be able to hear you. Luckily, conference speakers do usually have high-quality microphones built in, meaning that you can utilise these for their great input quality too.

On top of this, you can use lapel mics with the people inside of the physical meeting to ensure that everyone has maximum coverage and is heard correctly.

Camera

Making sure that everyone is seen is very important too. A great camera should do this — but there are a few options.

The best option is a 360 camera, which will show the whole room on camera to ensure that everyone is seen. However, there are other options too — you can use a camera with subject tracking as well as a panoramic camera to achieve the same goal.

Display

Ensuring that you have a high-quality screen so everyone in the room can see those who are connected remotely is vital. This screen needs to be large enough that everyone can see, and also have a high enough resolution so the picture is clear.

This screen will be placed at the front and center, so everyone can see it from wherever they are sitting.

Lighting

Lighting is tricky for a hybrid conference room. It’s not as easy as just putting on a ring light behind the camera.

You need to make sure that your room is well-lit everywhere, so the camera can capture everyone around the room in the best quality. You’ll also need to test your lighting temperature, but generally, a neutral temperature will work best here.

Creating Better Experiences with Microsoft Teams Rooms

Your equipment is one side of the story. You also need great software — enter Microsoft Teams Rooms.

Teams Rooms is the glue for any great hybrid meeting and has everything you need to be able to meet the aforementioned elements of an effective meeting. From intelligent and inclusive features to ensure everyone can participate in your meetings, to other quality-of-life features such as Copilot and AI speaker tracking, Teams Rooms has it all.

Ultimately, Teams Rooms will ensure that your meeting runs smoothly while also giving you tons of features to elevate the quality of your hybrid meeting experience. It’s a must-have for any company that wants to host hybrid meetings.

How To Get Started

Hybrid meetings are essential in the modern world. With remote working being so common, it can be difficult to get everyone in the same room. However, not having the right equipment or technology can be detrimental to your hybrid experience.

Microsoft Teams Rooms and great equipment will ensure that your hybrid meetings are of the highest quality by letting you take advantage of the power of modern technology.

If you’re looking to get started with hybrid meetings but don’t know where to begin, reach out to us today. Our experts are here to help and will ensure that your meetings hit the ground running.