Hybrid meetings are ubiquitous today, but technology is both a facilitator and a major hurdle. How do you make hybrid meetings a success?
The right equipment is essential for hybrid work. Those who have an adequately equipped home office are already in a good position. The next hurdle is to bridge the gap at the office between those who are present and remote employees or partners. The meeting room is central to this.
“Many vendors make the same mistake,” says Elizabeth Callens, Product Manager at Barco. “Their products are technologically strong, but they haven’t thought enough about the end user. When a user enters the room, they often don’t know what to do. Small things that go wrong can ruin a hybrid meeting.”
Never Simple Enough
The other experts, brought together by ITdaily to discuss the challenges of hybrid work, nod in agreement.
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“No matter how simple it is, it’s always too complicated”, summarizes Koen Van Beneden, Managing Director at HP Benelux. “People make mistakes. Technology can play an important role here. Today, people still have to manually connect to a meeting room, and that’s where things go wrong. Proactive technology, where the room and the device work together automatically, will solve this.” Van Beneden is confident that this is no longer distant future music.
Callens and Van Beneden are joined at the table by Femke De Vleeschouwer, Chief People Officer at Teamleader, Peter Van Hoof, Operations Director of BIS|Econocom, and Kristof Willems, Head of Product Management at Samsung.
No Meeting without Training
Van Hoof sees it as a reality that hybrid meetings require training. His company specializes in equipping meeting rooms, and he notes that training is a pain point. “Companies indicate that they want to provide the training themselves. In practice, we see that it often doesn’t happen.”
“Then people just stay behind their laptops during a meeting”, he observes. “The problem isn’t that the technology doesn’t work, but that people don’t know how to use the equipment. They don’t know the functionality. Once they do know how everything works, the meeting room is always fully booked, and people can’t do without it.”
Professional vs. Consumer Device
Willems also points out a lack of knowledge as an area for improvement. According to him, the problems start with the purchase of equipment. “The knowledge is lacking”, he suspects. “People don’t know the difference between consumer-grade devices and professional alternatives well enough.”
“All too often, you see meeting rooms with a commercial TV instead of a professional display. That professional device will immediately support a meeting well and, for example, switch to the correct input. Maybe it even has AI to create meeting transcripts and summaries. A consumer TV doesn’t have that, causing people to fiddle with the input and start hiding cables.”
Properly equipping meeting rooms is about more than professional displays. The era of a handful of large meeting rooms has passed. Around the table, there’s consensus that a variety of meeting spaces is essential, including small rooms for meetings with a handful of people, or even individual video calls.
More than a Large Room
“There’s an increasing demand for small spaces and solo spaces”, says Van Hoof. This also impacts the setup. Callens: “You need to set up the space according to its intended use. In a small space, the needs are different than in a large space. A cable for a PC and a slightly larger screen is sometimes sufficient.”
“Every company is different”, Van Hoof notes. “Sometimes sitting together is important, in other cases employees prefer to be on their own. It’s therefore important to monitor the use of spaces and ask people why certain rooms are not used and others are.”
“Monitoring is very important”, Willems agrees. “Nobody has too many meeting rooms, yet booked spaces are often empty.” The role of software is important in this regard, as there are already many tools that monitor the utilization of spaces. Even parameters such as air quality can be monitored. This is important: nobody will book a room if it no longer contains fresh air after half an hour, even if all the available technology is top-notch.
Added Value
When the right meeting rooms are equipped with the right materials, they offer great added value. All experts around the table experience this. Moreover, the investment is worthwhile. Hybrid work is here to stay, so hybrid meetings are too. Situations where half of the participants sit next to each other in the office behind laptops with headsets, and the other half at home, make nobody happy.
Unadapted meeting rooms present another risk. Too often, the focus of hybrid meetings shifts to the people physically sitting together, and the remote participants do not feel equally involved. This also puts a brake on the productivity of a meeting and makes everything run more cumbersome and unpleasant.
De Vleeschouwer summarizes it well: “Lost time costs money.” It is therefore in everyone’s interest to invest in the right equipment for the right meeting rooms, tailored to the needs of each company. And those who do so should not stumble at the finish line: don’t forget the training, so people also know how to use all the equipment, even if it’s just one button.
This is the first editorial in a series of three on the topic of hybrid working. Click on our theme page to see all the articles from the roundtable, the video and our partners.