Microsoft rethinks the hybrid meeting room experience

Microsoft has embarked on a mission to design more inclusive and collaborative hybrid meeting rooms.

In doing so, he experiments with new styles of furniture, audio-visual technology and room positioning.

In doing so, the tech giant is rolling out a new hybrid setup in some of its mid-sized and small meeting rooms.

This is for example the case at “The Hive”, the Microsoft headquarters campus in Redmond, Washington.

As Microsoft tinkers with such environments, it is developing a set of what it hopes will become new global audiovisual standards.

As a recent blog post from the tech giant explains, these standards detail how different elements of a meeting room should interact and intersect.

Matt Hempey, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft Digital Employee Experiencean organization that helps employees interact with digital tools in the workplace, describes his experience as part of the team working at The Hive: “We want to create an environment that is halfway between physical and virtual.

“These rooms represent the type of hybrid experiences we can deploy at scale around the world.

“We dedicated this space to really rethink how the meeting room should be redesigned to optimize a hybrid room.

“We cleared all the tables and all the technology and started again with a clean table.”

Hempey also gave his assessment of the teams:

As we work across our venues to make them optimized for hybrid, Microsoft Teams gives us the platform that allows us to be flexible, to deploy the right experience, with the right equipment, for every audience in every space.

The latest hybrid meeting room design

Although the pandemic has helped bring more equitable meeting room solutions to remote participants, with many employees returning to the office, Microsoft feels it needs to reinvent workplace design once again.

Fortunately, Microsoft Teams’ meeting room technologies have evolved since then, allowing it to better create new experiences for its employees, vendors, and customers.

Microsoft employees are using one of the new hybrid meeting room solutions that divides attention equally between those participating virtually and those present in the room.

Although changing the physical construction of a meeting room is not easy, after a few attempts, the employee experience team was able to build a single enclosure housing all the necessary video, audio and , networking, projection and computing.

This speaker can now be brought into a room and plugged in alongside additional technology, such as a wide-angle camera capable of using artificial intelligence for close-up views of participants.

Additionally, AI technology can be integrated into audio devices to minimize echo and howling, which previously negatively impacted the virtual attendee experience.

Sam Albert, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft Digital Employee Experience who works in the Hempey team and specializes in the physical construction of meeting rooms, gives an idea of ​​the scale of its redesign:

We had to rethink things from the ground up. The first thing we did was rotate the part.

“This allowed us to allow the people in the room to look at each other, but above all to also look at the people who were calling.

By shifting the focus from the center of the room to the camera at the front of the room, Albert explains, “It allows us to get closer to face-to-face interaction. Our front row alignment is an essential part of our hybrid meeting room experience.

UC Today recently explored how to choose the right technology for your Microsoft Teams room.