“In 2024, meeting rooms are reinterviewing for their jobs,” says Matthew Marzynski, a principal product manager for Microsoft Digital, our IT organization here at Microsoft.

And just like any job candidate, a meeting room must now demonstrate its adaptability, technological proficiency, and ability to foster collaboration in a hybrid environment, says Marzynski, who’s part of the team at The Hive, our meeting room incubation lab, where we invent the way modern meeting and collaboration feels.

Our journey of reinterviewing our Microsoft Teams-based meeting rooms is more than just a metaphor—it’s a crucial step toward creating workspaces that flex, adjust, and adapt to meet the demands of today’s world.

As is the case with most large companies, our shift to remote work happened suddenly with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. The pandemic, of course, upended the way the work world operates, thinks, and interacts. Its impact on our company culture, infrastructure, and processes has been long-lasting.

Before the pandemic, meeting rooms were primarily used for in-person gatherings, with virtual participation as an afterthought. Now that we’re deep into the era of hybrid work, powered by our Microsoft Teams Rooms platform, we understand that remote participants are equally important and should be treated as such. When we work in a culture that emphasizes freedom of location, technology shouldn’t limit that choice.

Small shifts weren’t enough

At Microsoft, we’ve already made improvements to smaller rooms and executive boardrooms, adding high-quality speakers and intelligent cameras that pan, tilt, and zoom automatically. We’ve also transformed our meeting spaces digitally and evolved the physical layout of our meeting rooms to better accommodate hybrid meetings and to promote collaboration. This includes more welcoming seating layouts, interactive displays, and top-tier acoustics, ensuring all participants, in-person or remote, have a good experience.

If you’re a remote participant, the only thing you see is a really small window where there’s a presenter somewhere in the front. The presenter looks about two inches tall, and you can’t tell anything. You feel like you’re on a bad public broadcast channel.

— Sam Albert, product manager, Digital Workplace and Meeting Experiences, Microsoft Digital

Our biggest challenge yet has been creating a top-notch remote experience for our very large spaces. Picture the kind of venues that host all-staff meetings, events, and large-scale training sessions. Historically, such gatherings—those with dozens or even a hundred people in the room and the same number online—haven’t given remote attendees a good experience, primarily because they weren’t designed with remote employees in mind. They tend to show only the presenter and leave out important context.

“If you’re a remote participant, the only thing you see is a really small window where there’s a presenter somewhere in the front,” says Sam Albert, product manager for the Digital Workplace and Meeting Experiences team at Microsoft Digital. “The presenter looks about two inches tall, and you can’t tell anything. You feel like you’re on a bad public broadcast channel.”

It’s difficult for presenters as well.

“Getting the feel of the entire digital and physical audience, getting the combined energy of the venue, that doesn’t really happen well in these spaces,” Marzynski says.

Compounding the challenge, the people in the room don’t have a sense of what’s going on online, and online participants aren’t able to interact with either the people in the room or their fellow remote participants.

Identifying problems like these is one thing; devising solutions is quite another. That’s what The Hive is for—it’s a laboratory for dreaming up new ideas and bringing them to fruition.

Addressing the complexities of large hybrid gatherings

When the team at The Hive took on the large spaces challenge, they quickly realized that layering on minor fixes wouldn’t do. A venue is not simply a scaled-up conference room because the dynamics of participation are different. Big, bold solutions were needed that required reexamining, reimagining, and redesigning both how Microsoft adapts existing tech and builds it fresh.

They’re an important 400 to get right because of the number of impressions an event generates plus the stakes involved. When something goes wrong, you can’t just move to another space.

— Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

Unique challenges

Since 2020, Microsoft has been refreshing and retrofitting its 13,000-plus meeting rooms worldwide, equipping them with advanced new cameras, improved audio, and front-of-room screens. Of these, only around 400 are venues, or as we call them at Microsoft, multipurpose rooms. But, as Marzynski puts it, “They’re an important 400 to get right because of the number of impressions an event generates plus the stakes involved. When something goes wrong, you can’t just move to another space.”

As The Hive team invented solutions for such rooms, they identified several unique challenges, including scale, cost, inclusion, and the technology itself.

Technological complexities

Our team at The Hive has had many direct engagements with our customers. And just like Microsoft, they’re evaluating their real-estate footprints and squeezing more value out of their square footage. They are also ”re-interviewing” some of these expensive and dedicated venues to ensure a fit for purpose. This common opportunity led to one of our team’s first technical hurdles: figuring out how to build video and audio for spaces that weren’t designed for hybrid meetings and weren’t built with AV capability from the ground up. Success would mean bringing better group experiences, at a lower cost, to more employees.

“Even before COVID, it was a challenge to build any kind of AV hybrid experience because these big rooms are just very complicated,” Albert says. “They require a lot of planning and expensive equipment.”

Marzynski cites the inherent flexibility needed for large spaces.

“You might set it up differently depending on the event,” he says. “You might have worktables. You might have desks like in a classroom, or you might have a banquet style with clusters of tables.”

Rather than inheriting a physical space and working our way in, we said, ‘All right, what if we separate these three streams? What do each of these stakeholder groups need?’ Then we took that and said, ‘All right, now what technology do we need to make that happen?’

— Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

Our team hypothesized that there were three things they had to address: the entire audience’s relation to content, the remote and physical audience’s relationship with each other, and the presenter’s relationship with both groups

“Rather than inheriting a physical space and working our way in, we asked, ‘What if we separate these three streams? What do each of these stakeholder groups need?’” Marzynski says. “Then we took that and said, ‘All right, now what technology do we need to make that happen?’”

Marzynski says that from there, the team built a prototype without a room in mind, “out in open air. We tested it. We prototyped it. We broke it to make sure that it was working. And then we asked ourselves, ‘Can we build a room around this? And does it have to be a specific room, or can it be kind of a range of spaces? Can it be flexible? Can it adapt? And importantly, ‘How much will it cost?’”

For a transcript, please view the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS3efXIKjpA, select the “More actions” button (three dots icon) below the video, and then select “Show transcript.”

Balancing cost and scale

Imagine a venue: a spacious training room, or a group of modular rooms that can be doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled in size. Because they’re large and designed for a high degree of flexibility, equipping such enormous spaces properly is expensive, mostly because of the custom technology required. They’re among the most expensive square footage that an office building can have, they cost a lot to operate, and they generate the highest percentage of service tickets in our AV estate.

The Hive’s success with hybrid-enabling and value-engineering smaller meeting rooms, and the positive feedback they received, buoyed their enthusiasm for their attempt to solve large spaces.

Everything we do, scale is at the forefront of our strategy. It’s one thing to come up with a really creative and awesome experience within The Hive. But if it can’t live outside of The Hive with one of our specialty experts operating it, then it’s dead on arrival.

— Sam Albert, product manager, Digital Workplace and Meeting Experiences, Microsoft Digital

The smaller conference rooms were one thing, but costs are higher for large venues with the extra technology needed to support them.

“Everything we do, scale is at the forefront of our strategy,” Albert says. “It’s one thing to come up with a really creative and awesome experience within The Hive. But if it can’t live outside of The Hive with one of our specialty experts operating it, then it’s dead on arrival.”

Customer Zero: Iterating through feedback

To redesign venues, The Hive team used its lab to stress-test AI-driven presenter cameras, dedicated displays for remote attendees, a dedicated camera to capture the live audience, and enhanced Microsoft Teams features, among other tech.

After they had a working prototype, they were able to try it out internally with real events and get feedback via our Customer Zero program, in which we test and improve our own tech to help make our products better and more engaging. This allows us to offer our customers the best product we can.

“We brought our very rough early prototype into one of our all-hands meetings. It went reasonably well, Marzynski says. “It was a friendly audience, and we got some fantastic feedback.”

They put that feedback into action and prepared to show off new features at the following all-hands. It wasn’t quite smooth sailing.

“We did a dozen or so test events and many of them went well, but a couple were awful. We attempted to integrate some new technology into the older, existing AV and it just failed. Mic feedback, people couldn’t hear each other, that kind of stuff. Everyone was frustrated.”

But that’s all part of the innovation process.

“The feedback we received was blunt but actually encouraging. Our test users saw the potential and were cheering us on,” Marzynski says, “it was ‘Let’s keep making this better.’ So we kept testing it over and over again and it actually helped us make some important design choices.”

At every stage, the team sat down with their Microsoft Digital colleagues to refine their approach.

“We had workshops with our design teams,” Albert says. “We met with our research teams. We interviewed instructors and presenters who do Azure trainings every day. We talked to participants. That gave us a chance to really understand and dig deep into a lot of the challenges that are faced by people who are using these spaces.”

Designing for an equitable experience

The feedback from their Microsoft Digital colleagues underscored one unequivocal principle: Anything The Hive team developed had to be inclusive, equitable, and accessible to both in-person and remote employees.

Why?

Doing so creates an even playing field. It builds company culture. It’s empowering. It’s collaborative. It’s also good for business: When remote participants aren’t at a disadvantage to their in-person peers, everyone feels more invested in the discussion and outcomes.

They’re part of the discussion and they’re not ignored. The larger the space, the harder it is to make everyone feel included. We added multiple cameras so remote employees can see the dynamic of the room.

— Roy Sherry, principal technical program manager, Hybrid Meetings and Workplace Productivity team, Microsoft Digital

Meetings that are natural and engaging help everyone feel like they’re in the same room.

“They’re part of the discussion and they’re not ignored,” says Roy Sherry, a principal technical program manager for hybrid meetings and workplace productivity at Microsoft Digital. “The larger the space, the harder it is to make everyone feel included. We added multiple cameras so remote employees can see the dynamic of the room.”

It’s about making remote attendees feel fully included. “They can be avatars,” Sherry says. “They can be themselves. Whatever makes them comfortable.”

The important thing is that their cameras show them on the participant display.

“That reminds people in the room that many of the attendees are remote,” Sherry says. “It improves the experience for both, and remote employees are less likely to be forgotten.”

That said, there’s no doubt that the experiences will never be exactly the same for those in the room and those calling in remotely.

“There’s a certain energy that we’re not able to—or even trying to—replicate for remote participants,” Albert says. “We’re not trying to make it equal, really. We’re trying to make it the best it can be for each group.”

Taking advantage of internal and external insights

As Customer Zero, Microsoft provides The Hive with a fertile environment for a virtuous circle of improvements and feedback. The team has been working closely with different product groups to drive new features and priorities, which they pour back into subsequent improvements.

For example, The Hive team has partnered with our Continuous Learning team that, owing to its numerous trainings, are heavy users of larger venues.

And externally, they’ve involved a few trusted customers to help them get even more actionable feedback, adding to the iterative cycle.

“We have conversations with customers and event planners to try to make sure we’re not leaving any big holes in our experience and capabilities,” Albert says. “We’re now trying to cover all these different scenarios that we might not have been expecting when we were originally designing the space.”

The team anticipates getting a manufacturing partner involved and piloting a handful of solutions with different partners in the US, India, and Asia. The key going forward is making the tech for these large spaces modular by design, so they’re easier and quicker to install—and easier to support.

We’re not ripping out walls. We’re not asking people to stand on tall ladders to change projectors and ceiling mics. We’re not running cables to server rooms. We’re using very simplistic AV designs that still provide all the experiences of enabling a team’s hybrid event.

— Sam Albert, product manager, Digital Workplace and Meeting Experiences, Microsoft Digital

Lessening the complexity is a key concern. Initially, installing the large venue solution that they built took 30 days and a lot of technical work. But working closely with the installers to streamline the process has cut that down to 2 days.

“We’re not ripping out walls. We’re not asking people to stand on tall ladders to change projectors and ceiling mics. We’re not running cables to server rooms,” Albert says. “We’re using very simplistic AV designs that still provide all the experiences of enabling a team’s hybrid event.”

We’re saving money because we need fewer AV devices and because our install time is significantly reduced. A room that took four days to deploy can now be deployed in less than a day.

— Roy Sherry, principal technical program manager, Hybrid Meetings and Workplace Productivity team, Microsoft Digital

Our new large venue solution has had another major benefit—it has substantially reduced our operating costs. “In our pilot, we’re seeing our cost of deploying these large rooms go down by more than 50 percent,” Sherry says.

The reason is the new solution is so much simpler than the old one.

“We’re saving money because we need fewer AV devices and because our install time is significantly reduced,” Sherry says. “A room that took 30 days to deploy can now be deployed in 2days.”

In addition, we anticipate that our total cost of ownership will go down over time because our room designs are easier to support and manage.

Building on success

As The Hive team continues to gather feedback and address the many complex aspects of creating hybrid capabilities in venues, they’re focused on solutions that please every participant, whether in person or remote, and keeping the barriers for entry, such as cost, as low as possible.

Their work has netted what they call “drop-in” solutions, which are less complex technology lifts that can be quickly deployed in existing spaces without a lot of infrastructure investment. Such spaces receive an upgraded technology kit that includes projectors and audience-framing cameras, among other goodies.

Albert reports that customers who have visited the demo at The Hive have shown great interest in piloting venue solutions in their own spaces. Working with the tech that The Hive team has created lowers the barriers that customers face in testing and discovering new solutions on their own and burnishes Microsoft Digital’s reputation as an IT innovation center.

Our work to reinvent our large multipurpose venues has just begun and will continue—so far these ultra important rooms are absolutely acing reinterviewing for their jobs.

Here are some tips on how you can improve your large meeting experience at your company:

• To meet your business needs in a hybrid world, rethink your employee experience across all digital capabilities and physical spaces.
• Historically, venue spaces haven’t given remote attendees an equal experience compared to those in the room physically, but doing so benefits all parties and is good for business: Hybrid multipurpose venues boost inclusivity, productivity, and accessibility for both in-person and remote attendees.
• Venues aren’t just scaled-up meeting rooms. The dynamics of large, hybrid events demand a different AV engineering approach.
• You positively impact your company culture when remote participants aren’t at a disadvantage compared to their in-person peers because everyone feels more invested in the discussion and the meeting’s outcomes.
• Companies spend a lot of money on real estate, but the priority needs to be on creating value without having to structurally redesign; that’s how you get maximum impact with minimum effort.

Learn more about The Hive team and its approach to creating hybrid experiences.

• Learn how we’re designing a new hybrid meeting experience for everyone.
• See how we enable our employees to work remotely with Microsoft Teams.
• Unpack why businesses need to rethink their workspace experiences now.

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The post Getting hybrid right: How we’re transforming large meetings at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.