Chapter 10
Creating Presence for All

Pre‐pandemic, not a whole lot of thought was given to how effectively a remote worker could take part in a meeting. Heck, it was often considered a win if someone could even connect to a meeting at all. Suffice it to say, the bar has been dramatically raised with the exponential adoption of video collaboration platforms, which will continue to provide the underpinning for hybrid meetings going forward.

“The expectation has completely changed,” says Eric Taylor, an IT and hardware collaboration expert. “There is an expectation if you're going to meet with someone remotely, that there's going to be video. It's going to be high‐quality video and the audio will be good.”

That's a far cry from where most people were back in March 2020, when “suddenly remote” workers were pretty much left to their own devices (literally their own webcams, if they even had one) and their own bank accounts to figure out how to be “present” in meetings. “The beginning of the pandemic, the funding strategy was … whatever you can steal from your office before it closed, or figure it out on Amazon,” according to Scott Wharton, the head of Logitech's Video Collaboration Division. Over time, some companies changed their policies and started to pay to equip their remote workers with webcams, and maybe even headsets, a trend that continues to this day. Says Scott, “Now we are seeing a much more structured stipend. I think at first the stipend started small, and then it started to get bigger because they realized it wasn't big enough.”

But gearing up employees to appear on the small screens of others isn't enough anymore. Now, companies need to consider how to create “presence” for all when some meeting attendees are virtual and some meeting attendees are back in the corporate conference room. Most meeting rooms prior to COVID‐19 were not video‐equipped, and business leaders now recognize that situation isn't going to fly in a hybrid environment.

It's a concern being voiced regularly by Logitech customers who are looking for solutions … fast. Scott explains, “There's an ‘oh shit’ moment happening all over the world when people realize they're going to come back. They've gotten used to using video, and they know they can't have their people walk into a meeting room with just a speakerphone.”

It's a tricky proposition to create presence for all in a hybrid meeting environment, and yes, the success of those efforts is largely reliant upon the participants themselves. However, even the prodigious facilitation skills of the meeting leader and the good intentions of the attendees can't make up for technology that doesn't put the virtual attendee on an as close to equal footing as possible with those who are physically in the same room. What it requires is a dual focus – equipping the individual and outfitting the meeting space.

In this chapter, we will explore:

• Rethinking the meeting room
• What to consider when evaluating equipment
• Investing in a remote worker's meeting setup

Equipping the Modern Meeting Room for the Hybrid Workforce

Think about the typical conference room in your office, pre‐COVID‐19. Maybe it held a basic long table surrounded by swivel chairs with a monitor on one end of the room. Maybe it was a fancier version with a management console that allowed you to turn the lights on, draw down the shades, and boot up the projector with the touch of a button. What was less likely to be in a typical room was a video camera.

“This is a new animal for some,” says Eric Taylor, who has helped customers develop in‐room collaboration systems for both Lenovo and Logitech. “A lot of customers I talked to have meeting rooms, but they were just sort of a place to just come in and talk in person – a place for all of us to get together so we didn't have to loiter in someone's office. Technology was never really a consideration. It was sort of an afterthought.”

With the transition to hybrid, that afterthought became top of mind as IT and facilities departments worked to create a modern meeting room capable of supporting meetings with video at their core. For some, the fact that the pandemic dragged on actually provided for a more thoughtful and methodical process, allowing teams to investigate the best solutions for their own unique needs. “They had a lot of time to look at every solution on the market,” says Eric. “They didn't just have to buy something and do it. They had a year to evaluate the heck out of everything and ask question after question that they would never have thought to ask before.”

So what questions did they ask? No matter where you are on the hybrid work journey, it's always valuable to learn how others approached the same problem. Allow us to shed some light on what factors came into play for those who were charged with making their meeting rooms work for hybrid meetings.

Can Everyone Be Seen and Heard?

You may be familiar with the most common incarnation of the video‐equipped meeting room. You know, the one that features the “bowling alley view,” where one camera is mounted at the front of the room, usually below a monitor. That basic in‐room setup was accepted as the norm prior to the pandemic but served no one especially well. What those joining the meeting virtually saw on their screens was the static view offered by the single camera of their colleagues seated around the conference room table … or at least that was the plan. In reality, people often were hidden from view if they hadn't adjusted their positions relative to the lens. The problem was compounded when, for example, someone walked over to the whiteboard, which was out of frame.

For the in‐room attendees, the single monitor was usually the bigger issue than the virtual attendees’ cameras. Provided that the image quality was high enough, perhaps they could make out their virtual colleagues’ faces, but that was greatly dependent on the size of the screen. Viewing virtual colleagues quickly went from bad to worse when a slide deck was involved. Eric Taylor remembers those days well: “In the instance with a single display, if someone shared content, like a PowerPoint slide, all of that video was put off to the side. So those remote folks were marginalized.”

To combat the issue of “unseen” colleagues, many organizations consider two key components: increasing the size of their displays and leveling up the quality of their cameras.

Meeting Room Monitors

At Pearson, they had the advantage of already being further along the video meeting room continuum than most because of a preexisting culture of video collaboration, according to CTO Steve Santana. He says, “Because we're pretty video‐centric, we've always had people who are in the room and not in the room. In fact, usually we have multiple rooms connected. So that would be the Boston room, the London room, the Durham room, the San Francisco room.”

Not surprisingly, they also place a premium on maximizing the screen size available to them, so everyone can have as large a presence as the technology will allow. “We have minimum 50‐inch displays in our rooms. Most of our large conference rooms are 75‐inch. And then in a couple of our large conference rooms, we have a large projector. We did all that, though, pre‐pandemic,” said Steve, who is based out of the Durham, North Carolina, office. “But what has happened is that because of the pandemic, our office is the template where they're testing out all the cabling, all the equipment, the display sizes, and aspect ratios relative to the size of the room. Big monitors everywhere is key for a true one‐to‐one experience.”

Did you notice that he said “monitors,” not “monitor”? A conference room with just one LCD display or ceiling‐mounted screen puts everyone at a disadvantage when any content is being shared, as Eric Taylor alluded to earlier. He adds, “We're starting to see a lot of interest in the dual display, where you have video on one display and content on another. That way it keeps the people on video engaged, and people realize that there are folks on the other end.”

The chance for the remote workers to disappear from the in‐office attendees’ minds during a meeting is a real threat if there is no adequate visual representation of them in the room, something Eric saw repeatedly when he observed how people used the meeting room technology. When remote attendees joined with audio alone, they were often forgotten until they made their presence known, sometimes taking their fellow attendees by surprise. “I would see everybody talking in the room and then that remote person would chime in. People would be startled because they'd forgotten that someone was on the line. They would do this thing where they'd look up at the ceiling because the voice was coming from the speaker in the ceiling. They'd look up at the ceiling to talk to them – just this headless voice,” recalled Eric with a chuckle. “But you start to see the behaviors change when the video is engaged because now they'll turn and actually look at the monitor. They'll look at the person on the screen to talk to them.”

With that in mind, where you place the monitors is also worth extra consideration. Placing the screens behind someone else's head or in a distant corner will diminish the role of the remote attendees. The monitors on which their faces appear should be situated in a way that emulates their place at the table, so they are as easy to see as the faces of those in the physical room.

Take a look at the following photo. Leave it to Google to come up with room design ideas that are on the leading edge. “Campfire” meeting rooms have people sitting in a circle, interspersed between large monitors on which their remote colleagues appear (Wakabayashi and Clifford 2021). Both in‐person and remote participants are on the same level – eye level, that is.

Source: Cayce Clifford/The New York Times/Redux

What is driving innovation in this area is what we have been harping on throughout the book – being seen and heard is critical to hybrid meeting success, and for remote attendees, that can be a bigger hurdle. The tech industry is constantly seeking to solve this problem by coming up with new products designed to put people on equal footing, whether they are physically or virtually present. As you evaluate what is on the market, use that quest for equality as your guiding principle – choose the products that will provide it best.

Cameras in the Conference Room

Now that we've addressed the screen setup in the meeting space, let's discuss the equipment used to beam the in‐person attendees to their remote colleagues. If your idea of a video‐enabled conference room is sticking a laptop at the end of the table and using the built‐in webcam to capture the scene, your efforts at holding an inclusive hybrid meeting will fail. The goal of an in‐room video system is to ensure the remote attendees feel like they are an equal part of the meeting, and offering them a grainy shot of the conference room is sending the wrong signal.

The makers of video collaboration hardware responded quickly to the increased demand of the fully remote work world and accelerated the innovation around it, a rate of change that has not slowed down. With that in mind, rather than focusing on specific products, allow us to share some features that should factor into your evaluation of what is currently on the market.

• Video Quality – Remember, the goal is to make the virtual experience as close to the face‐to‐face interaction as possible. For remote workers, a highly detailed image cuts down on video fatigue because no one needs to squint to make out facial expressions. In‐room cameras have come a long way in terms of the image they capture and transmit. Crisp lines and vivid color are all table‐stakes. High‐quality video is readily available and worth investigating if you have a network bandwidth capable of carrying it. 4K video resolution is no longer something that only the pickiest technologists crave, but 1080p HD video is where most products land. A word of caution: beware of the fish‐eye lens, which allows for an ultra‐wide angle. While a wider field of view can help ensure that everyone is seen, the distortion along the edges can make the final image distracting.
• Camera Controls – We've already mentioned some of the challenges of a static shot. People can often be hidden or drop out of view, and the drawbacks directly impact equal participation by all.

  Imagine this common scenario. One of the in‐person attendees has something really important to say but unfortunately is sitting at the end of the conference table, the furthest point away from the camera. The in‐room attendees nod in agreement, but the virtual attendees can't weigh in at all. The speaker is so far away that they can barely tell who is even speaking, much less make out what they are saying.

  A way to combat this is to invest in video equipment that goes beyond the static shot. Features like pan, tilt, and zoom can shrink the room and highlight individuals throughout the space, making them appear larger in the frame and increasing their ability to communicate in full through the screen. While some systems allow for manual adjustments to be made, others do it for you automatically, comfortably framing the speakers in a way that fits the conversation flow with auto‐zoom, auto‐focus, and auto‐face detection. Some conference cams are even designed to sit in the middle of the table and revolve 360 degrees, swiveling around to settle on the face of the person who is speaking.

  Our advice is to think about what makes the most sense in your space with an emphasis on emulating an in‐person experience. Even when we are all in the same room, we focus our attention on one person when they're speaking. Cameras can be optimized for a close approximation of that as well, provided there are ways to control the shot that is being captured. Opting for the single wide view puts the remote people at a deficit by diminishing their window into the in‐office action.

  From a meeting science perspective, the overarching aim is to help remote participants feel like they are present. That is, we need to get the cameras to make it feel as close to a face‐to‐face environment as is possible. You might think, “Why would we want to do that when the data you shared suggests hybrid is better?” The data demonstrates success when a hybrid meeting has enabled adequate presence for everyone.

  In a face‐to‐face meeting, it is not typically an issue for participants to be seen or heard, aside from the occasional soft‐spoken person who doesn't speak loudly enough. For the most part, it's assumed that a person is present and accounted for simply by being in the room. Sure, sitting at the back of the room or in a corner can diminish one's presence, but a good meeting leader can pull people into the meeting effectively no matter where they sit in the room.

  With virtual and hybrid, presence cannot be taken for granted; it must be built through the use of proper tools – ideally, tools that work so well that the attendees forget who's on camera and who's in person. The best technology enables collaboration so effectively that everyone can just meet and create together.

• Camera placement – If you are retrofitting a room that previously didn't have a camera, you may be stymied by something that may not have been considered in its previous life: lighting. Perhaps you have a bank of windows that provides beautiful campus views but could potentially put people in silhouette if the camera is capturing people sitting in front of them.

  Some organizations may have the budget to hire a lighting designer who will optimize the available natural light and supplement it with artificial light sources. However, most companies can get away with simply ensuring that no one is in shadow. Avoid pointing the camera at the bank of windows. As a general rule, backlighting is bad.

Meeting Audio Fidelity

While having high‐quality video is essential, you could argue that having excellent audio quality is even more so. After all, you could still have a meeting without video. A meeting with no audio is an exercise in miming.

Most conference cams include some sort of integrated microphone and speaker, with some of the better systems offering HD audio in addition to HD video. However, there are some conference cams that produce beautiful images but provide really crappy audio quality. Read reviews to determine whether the product you are considering is deficient in this area. If it is, move on.

Follow the guidelines offered by the manufacturer about the size of the room each conference cam is appropriate for. Pay attention to the microphone pickup range in the specs. For larger rooms, you may need multiple microphones to pick up everyone's voice no matter where they are seated. Think about where there might be audio holes that need to be filled. Some solutions have the ability to daisy‐chain microphone pods that can be placed strategically based upon your room configuration.

Ease of Use

Despite all of the changes wrought for meeting rooms as a result of COVID‐19, one thing has remained constant: a desire for the room to be easy to use. A system that has so many bells and whistles that no one knows how to even operate it has no value and will collect dust.

Prior to the pandemic, Karin recalls being shown a video‐enabled conference room by one of her clients who was excited to show it off. When asked how often it is used, her client responded, “Never, no one knows how to turn it on. The person who originally set it up no longer works here.”

Take it from Eric Taylor, who has guided countless clients through the selection process: “It needs to be quick and easy, and fairly immutable. The value of a meeting room is a ubiquitous user interface. So, when you walk into the room, you see the same user interface anywhere in the world.” The call for simplicity is being heard by industry. One‐touch solutions and all‐in‐one systems continue to come to market, promising a streamlined process for connecting everyone in the hybrid meeting room.

Leave Room for Improvement in Your Meeting Room Setup

Figuring out what setup works best for a hybrid meeting is a journey, not a destination. Even with the most careful consideration, what you thought might work in theory may not work when put into practice. “It's not a one‐and‐done. You don't just buy the hardware and set up the room and walk away. You've got to watch it and make sure it works,” says Eric Taylor. “Whole rooms will start to evolve, just like our home offices evolved with better furniture, better backgrounds, better lighting, better video and audio. I think we'll start to see that shift in the rooms as well, because they'll say, ‘Oh, we're going to start doing a lot of video in here. Maybe our room should have windows, or maybe we should have better lighting. And we're going to have to situate the cameras and the monitors to accommodate this new sort of model.’”

CTO Steve Santana agrees. While Pearson had already put an emphasis on video‐enabled rooms pre‐pandemic, Steve anticipates that the choices they made then may not be right ones for today's needs. According to Steve, “There's going to be tweaking of the audio. We have little mic pucks that I think we're going to be constantly playing with. Some of the cameras were set up where an architect put it in place, and we didn't really think of putting it on the right wall. Maybe there's a lot of windows that screw up the brightness and contrast. No one likes to chat with someone who looks like they're in the witness protection program. There are things that maybe we haven't spent as much time on that have become much more important.”

If you were hoping for specific product suggestions, this is not the right resource for you. Technology companies are spinning out new features, functionalities, and tools on a daily basis. Anything we'd recommend today could be outdone tomorrow as innovation drives new capabilities for cameras, audio equipment, and room setups. Our advice is simple: do your research and ask for feedback from the end users. Just because something is new doesn't guarantee it will lead to a better experience. The key is to be sure to stay at the forefront of these developments, remain flexible, and gravitate toward the tools that truly enable better hybrid meetings and don't just offer features with little to no real benefit.

In‐Office But Not in the Meeting Room

Don't be surprised if your in‐office employees don't all gravitate to the newly (and perhaps expensively) decked‐out meeting room. Remember, workers spent a significant amount of time joining meetings through their own screens and may want to still do that, at least periodically, out of convenience. In fact, in a study released in August 2021 by research firm Metrigy, 35% of the 476 global companies surveyed expect in‐office employees to stay at their desks to attend meetings remotely (Lazar 2021). We are already seeing that playing out.

Jay Hyett of Culture Amp holds a daily standup with his team of software engineers, many of whom are back in the office. Jay says that prior to the pandemic, his team members who were physically on‐site would typically all gather in the conference room for that daily meeting, but the fully remote experience changed that:

“I'm seeing that we are all popping up from different corners of the office on the screen … not going into a room but popping up. We have our conversation for 15 or 20 minutes and then we close it down and people get on with their day. Whereas traditionally, people would all have stood around a physical whiteboard in the conference room. Now the transparency is all still there, but it's just popping up from wherever.”

As this example illustrates, rethinking the meeting room experience is only half of the equation that sets a team up for hybrid meeting success. Those who are joining virtually need to be empowered with the right tools to ensure their presence is known and felt, which is where we now turn our attention.

Equipping the Remote Worker When Hybrid

Let's be clear. Equipping the remote worker doesn't mean equipping only a certain subset of employees at an organization. If you are truly hybrid, investing in high‐quality equipment for the remote worker means investing in high‐quality equipment for all workers. The idea of working hybrid means that any individual could be joining any meeting from the office or virtually on any given day, depending on the flexible work option they have arranged. If everyone's participation is valued, everyone needs to be empowered to participate from anywhere, so shoring up the home office setup is an important piece of the hybrid puzzle.

The good news is that many organizations already accomplished this during the days of fully remote work. They subsidized purchases of webcams, ring lights, and external audio options like headsets. But the willingness to pay for enhancements to at‐home setups was not universal. Research conducted for Microsoft's 2021 Work Trend Index found that only 46% of workers were reimbursed by their employer for remote work expenses (Microsoft 2021). Additionally, 1 in 10 reported that they didn't have adequate internet connection to do their job, a troubling statistic when inclusive meetings are an imperative.

“If you can't hear them and they can't hear you, people can't contribute,” says Dr. Sean Rintel, a Microsoft principal researcher who focuses on meetings. If there is no standardization on at‐home equipment, organizations run the risk of creating yet another tiered system, with the top tier being remote workers who show up with excellent visual and audio presence and the lower tier consisting of remote workers whose presence is lacking due to inferior image quality and audio drops. This is especially true if employers do not provide resources to their employees to outfit their home office. Depending on each individual's financial situation, they will purchase the camera and headset of their choosing, creating a truly nonstandard hodgepodge of audio and video quality. Therefore, standardization requires both specifying the camera and headset, and providing the resources to obtain them.

With the realization that virtual meetings aren't going away, organizations are starting to shift their thinking about outfitting home offices, according to Summit Leadership Partners’ Dan Hawkins. He says that what used to be considered a perk is now just the cost of doing business: “Prior to COVID, the C‐level might have had a fully paid home office with all of their equipment. Now, it's almost like giving someone their employee badge.”

If you are among the organizations that already equipped your remote workers when the world was fully virtual, congratulations! You will continue to get a substantial return on your investment with hybrid meetings becoming the norm. However, if you've been holding off, now is definitely the time to do so. We will offer you some basic guidance here, but if you would like additional recommendations, we suggest you check out our previous book, Suddenly Virtual, which offers a much more in‐depth look at how to empower your virtual meeting participants.

What Equipment Is Essential for the Remote Participants in Hybrid Meetings?

If you are looking for a place to start, sit at your desk when working from home and look straight ahead. If you're not staring at an external monitor, then heed these words from Logitech's Scott Wharton: “Step number one is you need a screen, because a laptop just isn't good enough to work all day from home. Once you make that decision, you need to accessorize everything around it. So, you're talking screen plus webcam, speaker, headset, mouse, keyboard.”

The nonnegotiables? An HD webcam and a solid audio option. As we mentioned in Chapter 9, what is built‐in to most laptops will not provide the same level of quality as an external camera and microphone (a headset, a standup microphone, or even a speakerphone pod). Sending out a work‐from‐home kit that includes a webcam and an external microphone option sends a clear message: We want to make it easy as possible for you to exude presence in the hybrid room by helping you participate in full. We are sending you this equipment because we want to be able to see and hear you as clearly as possible. Your participation matters.

A word of warning: putting the right equipment in the hands of your workers removes one of the major barriers to their ability to participate effectively, but one thing that can't be controlled is how well individuals use the tools, unless a concerted effort is made to train people to do just that. Even if they figure out how to plug in the webcam, they could still end up making all sorts of missteps. They can still situate themselves oddly in the frame, cutting off the top of their head or their chin. They can choose to plop themselves down in front of cluttered shelves of collectibles that distract and detract from their message. The way to address these issues is through training, which we will discuss in full in Chapter 12.

Equipping for Meetings with External Stakeholders

During a hybrid meeting, you want those attending virtually to have the infrastructure to connect effectively with their teammates, but investing in a solid at‐home setup also pays dividends for those employees who are customer‐ or client‐facing. Hybrid meetings with external stakeholders are happening as well, often replacing traditional face‐to‐face meetings.

Many sales professionals are desperate to get back to the handshake model of doing business in person but are finding themselves spending more time on their webcams than they'd like. Research conducted by McKinsey & Company found that only about 20% of business‐to‐business (B2B) buyers hope to return to in‐person sales (Bages‐Amat, Harrison, Spillecke, and Stanley 2020). That includes industries where field‐sales models have held a strong foothold, like pharma and medical products. In other words, sellers might want to be meeting face‐to‐face, but many of their customers may not want that.

Dave Egloff is a sales strategy and operations leader at Gartner who has seen this first‐hand:

Most sellers are clamoring to travel even when it's unnecessary. This makes sense since this is how they have found success previously. This is their playbook that they want to resurrect. The challenge is that many buyers don't need or even want to see sellers like they once did. Buyers are changing – therefore, sellers and sales execution must change.

Part of that change? Empowering people with the best equipment to help them land that sale through a virtual meeting.

Think about this real‐world scenario. A sales team has a meeting with a client prospect who requested to meet virtually, not in person. Two of the sales professionals join from a conference room in their corporate office. A third colleague joins virtually. The two who are in the office know their video and audio will be top‐notch because the conference room has been fully equipped and designed with hybrid meetings in mind, but the way the virtual attendee appears is a wild card. Imagine what would happen if they show up with subpar video that freezes and scratchy audio. What impression would that give the potential client? The way everyone shows up for that meeting is a reflection of the corporate brand. Ensuring that everyone is using high‐quality equipment, both in the office and outside of it, provides professional polish that might be a differentiator.

Conclusion

In a complex communication environment like a hybrid meeting, it should be a corporate imperative to provide presence for all, but making sure everyone can see and hear each other clearly is only the beginning. Collaboration among the remote and in‐room attendees needs to be supported as well, and, once again, technology can help, as we will discuss in Chapter 11.

Chapter Takeaways

• When equipping a meeting room for hybrid, the focus needs to be on creating presence for both the remote and the in‐room attendees.
• Make sure virtual attendees are visually represented enough to provide parity with the in‐person attendees.
• Increase the size and number of your monitors, and enhance the quality and features of your conference room cams to go beyond the “bowling alley view.”
• Pay attention to the microphone ranges to ensure that everyone's voice in the room will be clearly heard.
• Keep it simple. The latest and greatest may be quickly outdated and underappreciated when ease of use is the top priority.
• Expect your meeting room setup to evolve over time as you observe how it is used during meetings. Be open to tweaking.
• If you did not do so when you went fully remote, consider standardizing the equipment for remote attendees with high‐quality webcams and audio options.

References

1. Bages‐Amat, A., L. Harrison, D. Spillecke, and J. Stanley. 2020. “These eight charts show how Covid‐19 has CHANGED B2B sales forever.” McKinsey & Company, October 23. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/these-eight-charts-show-how-covid-19-has-changed-b2b-sales-forever
2. Lazar, I. 2021. “Weighing personal video conferencing endpoints for hybrid work.” TechTarget.com. Retrieved August 30, 2021 from https://searchunifiedcommunications.techtarget.com/tip/Weighing-personal-video-conferencing-endpoints-for-hybrid-work?utm:campaign=20210830_Zoom+introduces+new+sharing+features&utm:medium=EM&utm:source=NLN&track=NL-1817&ad=940057&asrc=EM_NLN_177947418
3. Microsoft. 2021. 2021 Work Trend Index: Annual Report – The next great disruption is hybrid work – Are we ready? https://ms-worklab.azureedge.net/files/reports/hybridWork/pdf/2021_Microsoft_WTI_Report_March.pdf
4. Wakabayashi, D., and C. Clifford. 2021. “Google's plan for the future of work: Privacy robots and balloon walls.” New York Times, April 30. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/technology/google-back-to-office-workers.html