Efficient hybrid meetings with smart technology

What is hybrid conferencing?

Hybrid working is described as a mix of different forms of work, with employees completing tasks and holding meetings partly in the office and partly from another workstation. Georges: "What is typical of blended working is that meetings both in the office and at home are enriched by innovative audio-visual applications. Simple work environments are thus given a modern facelift."

A good policy: guiding principles rather than fixed laws

How should hybrid working and conferencing take shape in your company? Ideally, you do this through a transparent company policy. "Setting clear ground rules is not a matter of rigid laws, but rather of teams and departments taking responsibility for determining the extent to which hybrid working is appropriate for employees and who is expected in the office when," says Georges. As part of that, determining who needs to come to the office for what activities and what tasks can be done at home is very useful.

Meetings can be enriched with innovative audio-visual applications. Simple work environments are given a modern facelift.

Georges Dratzidis, Senior Sales Consultant Hybrid Workspace at Proximus

New technologies take hybrid meetings to the next level

Georges: "Being in the office with all colleagues at the same time: that may be a thing of the past for good." Many companies have worked out a balanced mix of several days a week of structural telecommuting and being in the office. "In this new normal, bringing colleagues closer together and making cooperation as smooth as possible become crucial. To this end, Proximus provides innovative technological solutions that make a difference."

Get to know applications that future-proof hybrid meetings

In recent years, a lot of exciting technological developments have come onto the market that enhance the 'meeting experience'. "In speaker tracking, AI technology now ensures that a speaker is optimally imaged, zooming in or out as that speaker moves. Group framing does the same thing, but with a group of speakers. Both technologies have gone through quite an evolution, from using optical cameras to digital sensors with facial recognition."

Georges Dratzidis, Senior Sales Consultant Hybrid Workspace at Proximus

"Today you can also deploy a new generation of cameras that film people in a meeting room, cut them out and show them in a separate video stream in Microsoft Teams. This is called people feed and front row view.” “For example, with people feed, participants in a meeting room are shown the same way as remote participants," Georges mentions. This is also known as inclusive meetings, because every participant is featured in the same way. "Front row view goes a step further: this technology creates a premium meeting experience by displaying the remote participants at the bottom of the screen almost as life-size. Also, everyone can now follow along in the chats which is what is known as an immersive experience."

Georges Dratzidis, Senior Sales Consultant Hybrid Workspace at Proximus

Video interoperability is another application. "This technological solution allows you to use your current hardware with different meeting platforms. Usually, hardware is optimized for one platform, such as Microsoft Teams or Cisco Webex. But video interoperability allows you to use your existing hardware with other meeting platforms, retaining all the features such as sound, camera, screen, and so on."

What is clear is that new technologies anno 2022 offer better opportunities for actively engaging your employees in meetings, both physically and remotely. By the way, using special software, you can perfectly integrate existing video systems into these new applications, thus maximizing the product life cycle of said systems.