Embracing Hybrid Work:How to Enhance the Remote Audience Experience
Leading Hybrid Workday Experience Provider Convene Shares Best Practices for Creating an Inclusive Hybrid Meeting Environment
By Chris Abell, Director of AV Engineering at Convene
It is no surprise that the attitude around remote and hybrid work has shifted dramatically over the past two and a half years. Thirty five percent of American office workers are given the option to work fully remote, while another twenty three percent are working from home at least one day per week. With many companies looking to shrink office real estate to adapt to a hybrid workforce, how can those same companies continue to enable effective collaboration in the new age of hybrid work?
Flexible office space providers are an obvious opportunity to outsource some of this thinking, but what can we do internally to engage better our remote, hybrid, and in-person teams while maintaining – or improving – the quality of team-based productivity? At Convene, our first priority was not just enabling our large meeting and event spaces for hybrid workflows, but looking closer at the smaller meeting rooms and how we could improve the experience for both the in-room participants and those on the far end.
Conferencing solutions are now considered table stakes, and phones alone are no longer adequate; the remote audience can be the key stakeholders of a given meeting and equal weight has to be given to their audio-visual experience.
Historically, the remote attendee was an afterthought – someone who couldn’t make it. In fact, in 2019, there were an estimated 33 million huddle rooms globally, with only three percent equipped with video conferencing technology. Conferencing solutions are now considered table stakes, and phones alone are no longer adequate; the remote audience can be the key stakeholders of a given meeting and equal weight has to be given to their audio-visual experience. Convene believes connecting your remote and in-person employees in an effective way starts with the meeting room. Making considerations for the following can dramatically improve the quality of collaboration, especially for your far-end participants:
- Appropriate Lighting – Light for the camera first and the room second. Lighting has a significant impact on the overall camera quality. Avoid excessive down-lighting and ensure the color temperature is consistent. Balancing quality lighting for your in-room participants and for clarity on the far end is tricky. We have found that hiring professional architectural lighting designers has dramatically improved the overall quality of the camera image in small meeting rooms. Effective lighting can even improve the image quality of poor cameras.
- Camera Angles – There is a reason Apple invested significant research into their Eye Contact feature – eye contact is an evolutionary skill, and is a key indicator to colleagues that you are paying attention. We have spent years testing camera positioning to balance in-room aesthetics and quality framing. Avoid cameras positioned above displays and make sure that the entirety of the in-room participants are in the full camera frame.
- Quality In-Room Audio – Most would agree that quality audio is the key factor in a successful hybrid meeting. In fact, most software-based conferencing applications use transmission protocols that prioritize audio over video when correcting for poor network quality. Convene has focused on more modern audio technologies such as beam-forming microphones and audio Digital Signal Processing (DSP) with smarter Acoustic Echo Cancellation (AEC). Poor intelligibility on the far end can cause participants to disengage and can even cause mental fatigue.
- BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) – Building conference rooms that allow users to leverage their own computers to host meetings can be a simple, and cost-effective, way to enable flexibility. It also reduces the amount of hardware required in-room, easing fleet management, and simplifying troubleshooting while simultaneously reducing subscription costs overall. This has been a major focus of Convene’s product offering, focusing heavily on this flexibility and user choice.
- Multiple Displays – Multiple displays in a meeting were once considered an extravagance reserved for executive war rooms, however, the modern application of this design is hard to argue with. A large portion of in-person meetings these days include some degree of remote participation and physical screen real estate is at a premium. Adding an additional display to a room can give dedicated views for your content and your remote participants. A secondary display maximizes the size of the content in-room while maintaining clear views of the far-end, better emulating entirely in-person meetings.
Beyond an improved user experience, re-engineering small meeting rooms brings myriad benefits to the enterprise.
- Universal Infrastructure for Future Upgrades – Manufacturers have been focusing on leveraging more universal, network-based protocols for connectivity AVoIP, Dante, SDVoE, NDI, and AVB have become more ubiquitous and allow simple network cabling to transmit audio and video signals. This industry progression allows for basic infrastructure to go much further. It enables companies to regularly refresh hardware in meeting rooms without having to rip cabling from walls, resulting in significant downtime. More often than not, hardware-refreshes can become more plug-and-play
- Network-Connected Hardware for Remote Management and Support – With the shift toward network-based protocols, AV professionals can also participate in hybrid work. Whether using internally developed monitoring tools, manufacturer-supplied web portals, or simple VPN access, most equipment can be monitored and accessed remotely. Not only does this enable a historically in-person workforce the flexibility of hybrid work, but it can also be configured for highly proactive troubleshooting and break fix – your audio visual technicians can know a problem before anyone walks into a room.
- Data-Collection and Analytics – Many manufacturers have implemented tools for data collection, available through OpenAPIs or proprietary services, that can integrate into your own internal data analysis tools. The ability to evaluate book vs. no-show, participant counts, or time spent in meetings can help companies make informed decisions around building new meeting rooms, or expanding their real estate footprint in general.
Trends around in-person and remote collaboration will continue to evolve and change. By shifting priorities now and redefining meeting room best practices, you can stay ahead of the curve – whether your workforce continues to operate in a hybrid capacity or the focus shifts back to in-person meetings. Prioritizing quality meeting space technology will enhance team collaboration, regardless of your return to work strategy.