Digital Workspace

4 Ways to Optimize Meeting Rooms for Hybrid Work

Conference rooms need rethinking — and retooling — in the era of hybrid meetings. Start with these 4 tips.

Joel Snyder, Ph.D., is a senior IT consultant with 30 years of practice. An internationally recognized expert in the areas of security, messaging and networks, Dr. Snyder is a popular speaker and author and is known for his unbiased and comprehensive tests of security and networking products. His clients include major organizations on six continents.

Digital collaboration technology can make or break hybrid work in the public sector, where 88% of employees prefer to have the option to work at home or in the office as needed, according to Cisco. In fact, hybrid work at the state and local level has already demonstrated benefits that include improved citizen services in the cities of El Paso, Texas, and Buffalo, N.Y.

While this means that the home office has never been more important than it is now, it also means that hybrid conference rooms are at the center of the hybrid experience. With that in mind, here are four tips to boost the effectiveness of group meetings in conference rooms.

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1. Reimagine Audio and Video

Conference rooms equipped with a big screen and camera at one end are designed for room-to-room meetings. When local attendees talk and look at each other rather than the camera, remote participants feel excluded. Rethink the audiovisual layout to include wireless microphones that can be placed around the table to ensure that everyone can hear what is going on. If your budget allows it, multiple cameras with smart conferencing software give remote participants a much better feeling of inclusion.

2. Deploy the Right Hardware

Identify the important activities that people engage in while they’re in the conference room and find technology to support them. Focus on what assistive technology is needed for in-person group work, then extend to hybrid workers the ability to participate fully. For example, digital whiteboards have improved significantly. It may be smart to review whether the hardware and software you have is meeting your current needs.

EXPLORE: Digital collaboration solutions enhance the hybrid work experience.

3. Train Your Personnel

The struggle to connect laptops to the shared screen in the conference room is so common that it’s a running joke in many offices. The reasons are many: Plug-and-play sometimes isn’t. Drivers or agents may need to be loaded. People may not know which of the various dangling cables to connect. The critical remote control may be sitting next to one that is rarely used. Many of these problems can be headed off by brief training and practice sessions so that people know what to expect when they arrive.

4. Optimize, Maintain and Upgrade the Conference Room

Review room layout and design with an eye on hybrid meetings. With multiple remote participants in other offices or at home, you may need to rearrange tables and seating, lower cameras and screens, or even adjust lighting to accommodate multiple desktop participants. Meanwhile, regularly review conference rooms to be sure that all the tools are working, intuitive and labeled, that wireless internet coverage is solid, and that power strips and chargers are where they need to be.

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