What is a hybrid meeting?

Hybrid meeting challenges

The greatest technological challenge facing hybrid meetings is the lack of a standardized experience. Even within an office, meeting attendees could be joining from a mix of settings, such as meeting rooms, huddle rooms and desks. They may be using company-supported devices but also personal endpoints that IT has little control over. Furthermore, in terms of the meeting experience, attendees might face a mix of quiet and noisy settings.

The variations within hybrid meetings are even greater for remote workers. They might be joining either from home, from their car or from third spaces, such as coffee shops. All of these settings present IT challenges, such as having adequate bandwidth, secure connectivity, endpoints that can support the meeting platform and an environment where audio and video quality might not be business-grade.

A key reason why a standardized experience is so important is the need for remote and in-office participants to feel equally involved during meetings.

These technical elements aside, a key reason why a standardized experience is so important is the need for remote and in-office participants to feel equally involved during meetings. This benefit cannot be understated, especially given how much time workers spend in meetings and the fact that many workers are now splitting their time between home and office for work.

To have truly effective hybrid meetings, IT must keep these realities in mind when choosing technology partners. Not all unified communications as a service (UCaaS) offerings are created equal, and only by taking stock of how your meetings are typically conducted can you find the right platform for supporting them.

Hybrid meetings benefits

On a broad level, the technology decisions made by IT to support hybrid meetings should align with the organization's overall plans to adopt a hybrid work model. Meetings are a key use case for UCaaS, but these platforms are also used for everyday communication and individual forms of work.

The versatility of UCaaS is, in fact, one of its core value drivers. Employees can get the bulk of their work done in one place, whether it's meetings or one-to-one communication. When all these use cases have a standardized experience, both remotely and in office, it stands to reason the hybrid work model will be more effective.

By extension, when you provide the right tools for hybrid meetings and hybrid work in general, employee engagement improves. When workers don't have to switch in and out of applications for meetings and when workflows are the same regardless of workplace setting, they can focus more on the task at hand.

Most of all, workers will feel more connected to the team, leading to a greater sense of purpose and fit with company culture. In this context, decisions around UCaaS need to be viewed as more than just making hybrid meetings easier to manage.

Another important benefit is that hybrid meetings are an ideal use case for AI. All UCaaS vendors have already incorporated many AI features into their platforms, such as real-time translation, automated meeting summaries and video autoframing to ensure all participants are represented equally on screen during meetings.

AI assistants and copilots have quickly become a standard UCaaS feature, and vendors are rapidly innovating to make their platforms AI-first. These capabilities are helping to bridge experiences between remote and office-based workers. As organizations make sense of what is a hybrid meeting for their operations, they'll use these tools to make their meetings more seamless, even as workers become more comfortable adopting AI overall.

Editor's note: This article was updated to provide up-to-date information and improve the reader experience.

Jon Arnold is principal of J Arnold & Associates, an independent analyst providing thought leadership and go-to-market counsel with a focus on the business-level effect of communications technology on digital transformation.