Creating a seamless hybrid meeting experience for everyone

In this episode of The Collaboration Space, Jen Sigmund, Senior Manager of Workplace Experiences at Americas Barco, chats with host Nancy Lussier about hybrid meetings. Jen shares tips on how to streamline your meeting experiences to make them equitable.

What employees think about hybrid meetings

Before the COVID pandemic, meeting equity existed because everyone was in the same meeting room, especially if it was an important meeting. During the pandemic, there was meeting equity—because all team members were remote participants. Now that many companies have embraced hybrid work, there are new issues that need to be addressed to ensure all participants, regardless of where they are, have the same opportunity to participate in meetings.

Some of the most common concerns employees have about meeting equity include:

• It is difficult to have their voice heard when they join a hybrid meeting.
• Many hybrid meetings are still office-centric because they focus on the meeting participants physically in the room.
• In-room participants may not look at the camera or engage with remote participants as often as they do with their counterparts in the meeting room.
• Meeting leaders cater too much to the in-room participants, causing inequity in the meeting.

Streamline meeting experiences for everyone

To create the same experience for all participants, start by determining what challenges your team members face when joining and navigating hybrid meetings. These typically include:

• Cable issues. Many employees struggle to connect their laptop to the room system so they can share content.
• Connection issues. Employees often have difficulty connecting to audio and video peripherals in the meeting room.
• Communication challenges. Missing non-verbal communication cues (body language, gestures), misreading social cues, or difficulty adapting to cultural differences.

Next, focus on the meeting platform. If the meeting room equipment only supports one platform and it’s not the one the meeting organizer wants to use, it can be frustrating. Employees either struggle through using the unfamiliar platform through the room system or they launch their preferred platform on their laptop and try to make that work with the room system.

A better way to handle this would be if the room system knew what platform the meeting organizer preferred and adapted automatically. That’s exactly what smart meeting flows through Barco ClickShare do. The ClickShare system anticipates what you want to do as a meeting owner when you walk into a room, then sets up the meeting so it is flawless and easy to use, regardless of the platform.

Watch the podcast to learn more about how the Barco platform can help you create seamless hybrid meeting experiences and provide equitable outcomes for all participants.