We moved the third camera around to show a close-up view of presenters, flip charts, and wall charts throughout the session as needed. We mounted two of the webcams on tripods, which faced the in-room attendees so remote participants could see who was speaking. The people meeting in person are - at least for the moment - so thrilled to finally be together again the last thing you want is for them to crouch over their individual laptops all day for the sake of the remote participants.Įspecially in cases where cutting edge video technology is unaffordable or unavailable, a little ingenuity can go a long way to create a high-quality video experience for everyone.įor example, for a two-day offsite at a Florida hotel with 10 in-person attendees and two remote participants (one in Zurich and one in LA), we attached three webcams to laptops, and used a fourth laptop to share what was on the main screen (usually a PowerPoint). Clients frequently suggest this type of “in-room virtual meeting.” However, if the folks gathering in the room spend the meeting on their computers, they might as well have stayed in their homes or offices. It is tempting to just ask the in-person attendees to open their laptops and join a Zoom meeting (on mute), so remote participants can see everyone’s faces and documents can be easily shared. Consider video from the remote participant perspective.Īs you design the meeting, continually ask yourself: What do remote participants need to see in order to fully engage? They should be able to see the faces of in-room attendees, shared presentations, physical documents handed out, content created during the meeting on whiteboards or flipcharts, etc. You should investigate what technology upgrades might be accessible to help make your team’s experience more immersive and authentic. Microsoft is developing new types of meeting rooms optimized for the hybrid experience. As providers invest heavily to better enable hybrid meetings, new features are being introduced to improve face-to-face communication among in-person and remote attendees.įor example, Zoom’s Smart Gallery (targeted for completion this year) uses artificial intelligence to detect individual faces in a shared room and pull them into panes on the screen so remote participants can see them in the now-familiar gallery view. The pandemic accelerated the use and evolution of videoconference technology to enable virtual meetings from PCs, tablets, and phones. If you’re in a hotel or other temporary meeting space and multiple microphones aren’t a viable option, consider supplementing your audio input by having in-person attendees pass around a hand-held microphone before speaking. To avoid a last-minute scramble caused by poor audio, make sure the room is equipped with enough high-quality microphones so remote participants can hear. Pre-Covid, we often heard remote participants say, “I’m sorry, can you get a little closer to the speakerphone and repeat what you just said?” Now, they expect to hear everything clearly - just as they can on Zoom. Yet while a lot of attention is paid to the visual aspects of meetings, audio is often overlooked until the last minute. While remote participants need to see who is talking and what’s taking place in the meeting room, great audio is actually more critical.
#MAKE VISUALS GREAT AGAIN REQUIREMENTS HOW TO#
Just as executives learned how to run great virtual meetings over this past year, they now need to learn how to conduct great hybrid meetings as well.ĭrawing from our combined half-century of experience designing and facilitating meetings for executive teams and boards, we’ve assembled eight best practices to help make your hybrid meetings more effective: 1. They are easy to do poorly and hard to do well - remote participants are only one slip-up away from losing that first-class status.
There’s simply no going back to the world of “squawk boxes” on the conference room table, with those on the phone straining to hear, being “talked over” when trying to speak, or guessing what’s on that PowerPoint slide on a screen only their colleagues in the room can see.Īs Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO recently put it, “We want to ensure those joining remotely are always first-class participants.”īut hybrid meetings are vastly more complex than meeting in-person or virtually. This new model will bring with it a dramatic change in how we meet - a hybrid mix of in-person attendees and remote meeting participants seems an inevitable component of our “new normal.” A recent McKinsey survey suggests that 90% of organizations will adopt some combination of remote and on-site work as they emerge from Covid restrictions.