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It\u2019s a new era, and even meeting rooms must reinvent themselves.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s a new era, and even meeting rooms must reinvent themselves.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn 2024, meeting rooms are reinterviewing for their jobs,\u201d says Matthew Marzynski, a principal product manager for Microsoft Digital, our IT organization here at Microsoft.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s part of the team at The Hive, our meeting room incubation lab, where we invent the way modern meeting and collaboration feels.<\/p>\n
Our journey of reinterviewing our Microsoft Teams-based meeting rooms is more than just a metaphor\u2014it’s a crucial step toward creating workspaces that flex, adjust, and adapt to meet the demands of today’s world.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Before the pandemic, meeting rooms were primarily used for in-person gatherings, with virtual participation as an afterthought. Now that we\u2019re deep into the era of hybrid work, powered by our Microsoft Teams Rooms platform<\/a>, 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\u2019t limit that choice.<\/p>\n At Microsoft, we\u2019ve already made improvements to smaller rooms<\/a> and executive boardrooms<\/a>, adding high-quality speakers and intelligent cameras that pan, tilt, and zoom automatically. We\u2019ve also transformed our meeting spaces digitally<\/a> and evolved the physical layout of our meeting rooms to better accommodate hybrid meetings<\/a> and to promote collaboration<\/a>. This includes more welcoming seating layouts, interactive displays, and top-tier acoustics, ensuring all participants, in-person or remote, have a good experience.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u2014 Sam Albert, product manager, Digital Workplace and Meeting Experiences, Microsoft Digital<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n 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\u2014those with dozens or even a hundred people in the room and the same number online\u2014haven\u2019t given remote attendees a good experience, primarily because they weren\u2019t designed with remote employees in mind. They tend to show only the presenter and leave out important context.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you’re a remote participant, the only thing you see is a really small window where there’s a presenter somewhere in the front,\u201d says Sam Albert, product manager for the Digital Workplace and Meeting Experiences team at Microsoft Digital. \u201cThe presenter looks about two inches tall, and you can’t tell anything. You feel like you’re on a bad public broadcast channel.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s difficult for presenters as well.<\/p>\n \u201cGetting the feel of the entire digital and physical audience, getting the combined energy of the venue, that doesn\u2019t really happen well in these spaces,\u201d Marzynski says.<\/p>\n Compounding the challenge, the people in the room don’t have a sense of what’s going on online, and online participants aren\u2019t able to interact with either the people in the room or their fellow remote participants.<\/p>\n Identifying problems like these is one thing; devising solutions is quite another. That\u2019s what The Hive is for\u2014it\u2019s a laboratory for dreaming up new ideas and bringing them to fruition.<\/p>\n When the team at The Hive took on the large spaces challenge, they quickly realized that layering on minor fixes wouldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n They\u2019re 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\u2019t just move to another space.<\/p>\n \u2014 Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n 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, \u201cThey\u2019re 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\u2019t just move to another space.\u201d<\/p>\n As The Hive team invented solutions for such rooms, they identified several unique challenges, including scale, cost, inclusion, and the technology itself.<\/p>\n Our team at The Hive has had many direct engagements with our customers. And just like Microsoft, they\u2019re evaluating their real-estate footprints and squeezing more value out of their square footage. They are also \u201dre-interviewing\u201d some of these expensive and dedicated venues to ensure a fit for purpose. This common opportunity led to one of our team\u2019s first technical hurdles: figuring out how to build video and audio for spaces that weren’t designed for hybrid meetings and weren\u2019t built with AV capability from the ground up. Success would mean bringing better group experiences, at a lower cost, to more employees.<\/p>\n \u201cEven before COVID, it was a challenge to build any kind of AV hybrid experience because these big rooms are just very complicated,\u201d Albert says. \u201cThey require a lot of planning and expensive equipment.\u201d<\/p>\n Marzynski cites the inherent flexibility needed for large spaces.<\/p>\n \u201cYou might set it up differently depending on the event,\u201d he says. \u201cYou might have worktables. You might have desks like in a classroom, or you might have a banquet style with clusters of tables.\u201d<\/p>\n Rather than inheriting a physical space and working our way in, we said, \u2018All right, what if we separate these three streams? What do each of these stakeholder groups need?\u2019 Then we took that and said, \u2018All right, now what technology do we need to make that happen?\u2019<\/p>\n \u2014 Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Our team hypothesized that there were three things they had to address: the entire audience\u2019s relation to content, the remote and physical audience\u2019s relationship with each other, and the presenter\u2019s relationship with both groups<\/p>\n \u201cRather than inheriting a physical space and working our way in, we asked, \u2018What if we separate these three streams? What do each of these stakeholder groups need?\u2019\u201d Marzynski says. \u201cThen we took that and said, \u2018All right, now what technology do we need to make that happen?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Marzynski says that from there, the team built a prototype without a room in mind, \u201cout in open air. We tested it. We prototyped it. We broke it to make sure that it was working. And then we asked ourselves, \u2018Can 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, \u2018How much will it cost?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\nSmall shifts weren\u2019t enough<\/h2>\n
Addressing the complexities of large hybrid gatherings<\/h2>\n
Unique challenges<\/h3>\n
Technological complexities<\/h3>\n