What are they?
A hybrid meeting is one where a portion of the audience joins in-person at a shared physical space, while another subset joins remotely, enabled by audio and video conferencing technology.
What are the benefits?
Hybrid meetings bring together the best of both worlds: in person interaction and the technical capabilities of virtual collaboration platforms. The conversations and content that benefit the most from nonverbal communication and eye contact can be executed in-person, and the material that benefits most from the scale, transparency, and visibility of virtual interaction can be done using collaboration platforms.
A huge advantage of this style of meeting is the ability to reach a larger audience at a low cost and minimal environmental impact. In a similar vein, hybrid meetings can help overcome physical meeting space limitations, by extending a virtual invitation to attendees once physical capacity is met. Another advantage includes the ability to combat poor registration numbers; when registration numbers are low, adding a hybrid component can pull in attendees that weren’t able to attend due to a scheduling conflict, travel time, costs, or other reasons. If there is a registration fee associated with your event, you can greatly increase revenue generated by adding a virtual ticket at a slightly lower registration fee. This not only increases revenue, but it off-sets the costs associated with the in-person component. Finally, adding a virtual extension to your meeting may help you reach those critical audience members who can’t attend in-person due to travel time or costs.
Businesses with a remote workforce, as well as companies with geographically dispersed teams find significant benefit in hybrid meetings. Organizations that require travel may also rely on hybrid meetings, and on the contrary, businesses committed to sustainability may prefer hybrid meetings over travelling to in-person meetings.
What is required?
Depending on the scope of the meeting, fast and consistent Wi-Fi is crucial. For larger meetings, several digital touchpoints including apps, slide centre solutions, voting systems, live streaming, social media interactions and real-time chat functionality may all need to be supported, which requires high-bandwidth internet connection.
Ensure the meeting is designed to appeal to both in-person and virtual attendees. In other words, the meeting should feel like one event, but two separate experiences; activities shouldn’t isolate one group from participation. Multiple session formats are a great way to engage participants and accommodate both in-person and remote attendees. Interactive workshops, roundtable discussions, breakout rooms, and hands-on training sessions are all great options for an immersive meeting.
How can I start implementing hybrid meetings?
The below questions will help you begin to move toward a hybrid approach:
Get in touch to learn how Colloqui can partner with your business to bring your hybrid meeting to life.
What Meetings Will Look Like In The Future was initially published on February 1, 2021 by Forbes.
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