News & Trends

Finding Solutions to Hybrid Work Conferencing Issues

The idea of what hybrid work is has changed so much – even in just the past year, and it’s only expected to continue evolving. At Infocomm 2022 in Las Vegas, the educational session Conference Room Refresh to Support Hybrid Work touched on this topic.

The panel was led by Steph Beckett, managing editor at rAVe, and included Andy Howard, managing director at Howard & Associates; Nia Celestin, vice president of Marketing at DTEN; Irwin Lazar, CISSP, president and principal analyst at Metrigy; and Tom Richards, Director of Product Management at Cisco.

Their educational discussion brushed up on the topic of hybrid work, starting off by clarifying the definition of “hybrid.”

“Early on, hybrid was simply about making a connection between somebody remote and somebody in the office,” said Celestin. “And I think it’s evolved to be much more than that. It’s evolved to: How do you not just make a connection but create an environment to enrich? That evolution of the definition has also impacted the technology that technology companies are building and coming out with. From a hardware perspective, to be able to create a level of interoperability in a room, we do things like direct guest join to allow, for example, if you're using a DTEN device and you're in a Zoom call, and then you want to go into a Microsoft Teams call, you can do that on a DTEN device.”

There are many expectations for what technology should do in a conference room and beyond. But on the bright side, there are a surplus of technologies and design methodologies that can enhance meetings for both the room participants and remote ones, such as:

• Camera technologies to provide multiple zoom options
• Room layout to place screens on the side of the room (instead of at the end of the room)
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities that can enhance the view of the room

 Although there are many solutions out there, one of the hybrid workplace challenges includes something called “analysis paralysis.”

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