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Part of: Build a strategy to support hybrid meetings and meeting equity

What is a hybrid meeting?

Employees are now signing into meetings from a variety of locations. What's the best way to support hybrid meetings and to ensure that workers remain productive and engaged?

Jon Arnold
By
Published: 31 May 2022

By its nature, a hybrid meeting involves people located in a variety of settings, encompassing team members in the office, at home and those in remote or mobile locations.

Each location has its own connectivity demands and challenges, and even within a single site -- say an office -- people might be working from their desks, within a conference room or in a huddle room.

Yet, even as IT confronts the concept of "what is a hybrid meeting," one thing is clear: Business will have to support them all.

A more fluid workspace changes the equation

Today's world of hybrid work presents technology challenges on many levels, and determining the best way to support meetings is particularly important when maintaining productivity. The workplace has become more fluid, and while there will always be some meetings where everyone is in the same space at the same time, hybrid is the new normal.

For hybrid meetings to be effective, IT leaders must provide a collaboration foundation that works seamlessly across various settings. This is a prime use case for unified communications as a service (UCaaS). A cloud-based platform is the best way to support distributed teams. It presents users with a uniform set of collaboration applications, as well as a consistent experience.

Endpoint capabilities pose challenges

But making UCaaS effective is harder to do than it appears. Hybrid settings are highly variable, especially in terms of broadband service and endpoint capabilities. Not only must UCaaS work equally well across office, home and remote settings, but it must also perform in scenarios where workers change settings during a meeting, such as going from a home work space to a mobile setting.

As hybrid meetings grow in number, so will the ways meeting participants choose to log in. Supporting them all is essential for team productivity, as well as for employee engagement. As such, there's a lot at stake for IT leaders to deploy the right approach. This will require a new perspective, thinking in new terms of what is a hybrid meeting rather than the pre-pandemic world where most meetings were office-based.

Dig Deeper on UCaaS and cloud-based UC

Part of: Build a strategy to support hybrid meetings and meeting equity

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What is a hybrid meeting?

Employees are now signing into meetings from a variety of locations. What's the best way to support hybrid meetings and to ensure that workers remain productive and engaged?