Meetings are a little different these days.
We used to file into meeting rooms once a week (or even more frequently for some), sit around a desk, and watch as only a handful of people contributed to a conversation. In recent years, the quest for more efficient and meaningful meetings has prompted a range of changes.
It started with virtual meetings and huddle rooms that offered space for only the most vital team members to collaborate. People gradually began dialling into meetings and chatting online through messaging services to avoid unnecessary conferences. Progress was happening – but not particularly quickly. Then 2020 arrived.
The pandemic in 2020 pushed virtually every business leader to embrace video conferencing to bring people together in the age of social distance. Now, we’re all taking part in multiple meetings every day. These video meetings are more accessible and convenient than their old-fashioned counterparts, but they still require careful strategizing, and the use of the right tools.
Enter the breakout room.
What is a Breakout Room?
Breakout rooms are tools in the video meeting landscape that allow you to split your video or audio session into a multitude of environments. With a tool like Zoom, for instance, you can have up to 50 different sessions. In Google Meet, you can create up to 100 breakout rooms in a call.
Breakout rooms are intended to support companies hosting larger meetings with big groups of attendees. Imagine you were having a business-wide conversation with your entire organisation. It’d be difficult to get any rapport going between team members before the meeting begins when around 50 employees are trying to talk at once.
Breakout Rooms split all your employees into smaller groups, where they can have private conversations. For instance, you could create separate breakout rooms for your marketing, sales, and product development teams when having a meeting about the creation of a new product. After an announcement, each team could go to their respective breakout room and discuss the announcement. This will be a chance for supervisors to answer any questions, and for employees to discuss concerns.
In breakout rooms, you have an easier way to address smaller groups of people within your meeting, without the chaos of everyone sharing one space.
Who Uses Breakout Rooms?
So, who are breakout rooms for?
There’s no single answer to this. Any team using a video or audio conferencing solution that needs to separate attendees into smaller groups can benefit from a breakout room.
Some of the most common use cases for breakout rooms include:
- Enterprise meetings: If you’re having a large all-hands meeting with dozens of team members, and you need to give those employees space to ask questions and gain clarity, breakout rooms are essential. These rooms will give your employees a space where they can interact with colleagues, discuss the announcements that you’re giving, and ask questions. Breakout rooms are usually a much easier way to deal with questions and concerns in a large meeting, and they take up less time than attempting to answer every concern individually within a huge group session
- Training opportunities: If you’re hosting a training session over the web with your employees, it’s always helpful to have breakout rooms. These days, online learning and virtual training experiences have grown significantly. In the “real” world, training professionals would usually split teams into groups to work on projects together. In the virtual environment, breakout rooms can be a good alternative to these groups. The breakout space gives teams a place where they can discuss ideas, work on projects, and even just ask questions when they need extra help
- Educational environments: Breakout rooms aren’t just useful for enterprise education either. As more schools and higher education facilities continue to offer lessons online, breakout rooms are becoming a valuable investment. Teachers can use breakout rooms to speak to students or allow groups to work together on projects. These spaces can also be a great space for educators to come together and discuss the next stage of a lesson while students have a moment to socialise
Where Can You Find Breakout Rooms?
While breakout rooms aren’t yet a feature of every conferencing tool, they’re growing increasingly common. As groups spend more time working and interacting online, breakout rooms are becoming a valuable way to connect colleagues and indivduals.
Notably, these tools don’t just have to be a way to chat about work and projects. Breakout rooms can also allow for some much-needed social interaction.
As many teams have discovered first-hand throughout 2020, it’s often difficult to thrive in an environment where we feel isolated from our peers. Human beings need moments of authentic communication, whether it’s those watercooler-type moments where they chat with colleagues about their weekend, or discussions with friends in the classroom.
Just some of the available tools offering breakout rooms include:
- Zoom: Zoom breakout rooms allow users to split their session into up to 50 meetings. You can choose to split participants manually or automatically. You can also allow your participants to choose which sessions they want to enter
- Teams: Microsoft Teams users can access up to 50 breakout rooms in a call. Organisers can start breakout rooms in Teams meetings or channel meetings. Users can also allow participants to return to the main meeting room at any time
- Google Meet: Google Meet supports up to 100 breakout rooms in a single call. You can divide participants however you choose as a moderator, and even randomly mix groups to encourage outside conversation
- Cisco Webex: Cisco Webex users can split their attendees into smaller groups, choosing exactly who should be present in each room. You can even control which participants can start their own breakout rooms
- RingCentral: Through RingCentral, you can create up to 50 breakout rooms from one call. After a host opens a room, participants will be able to go into rooms of their choice, or admins can assign people to specific rooms
How Do You Use Breakout Rooms?
Collaboration and conferencing tools have revolutionized the way work and live on a massive scale. These days, it’s easier than ever to simply connect with a colleague through video at the click of a button. We can set up meeting conferences with huge groups of people or have one-on-one conversations. There’s also the option to share screens and files in real-time.
Like most features in the modern conferencing tools, we use today, breakout rooms are often quite intuitive. The way that this feature works will depend on the kind of service you invest in. However, most of the time you’ll be able to set up a range of breakout rooms as an administrator
Breakout rooms usually come with a range of options that allow you to adapt how they work for your users. For instance, you can set up specific sessions for individual groups, or you can allow your team members to choose which breakout rooms they want to be part of.
Many solutions that offer breakout rooms today also come with the option for users to be able to take on different roles within the breakout session. For instance, you could choose team leaders who are able to add and remove people from the breakout. You can also choose whether you want your staff members to be able to leave the room and come back into the main meeting at any time.
Ultimately, as an administrator, you’ll have the freedom to choose how your breakout rooms should work for the rest of your team. If you’re an attendee in the meeting, then joining a breakout room should be as simple as clicking a button. Most of the time, attendees will see a notification that either gives them the option to join a breakout room or get automatically added to the session.
Administrators should ensure that they have the right policies in place for things like collecting recordings from breakout rooms or enabling various privacy settings.
The Benefits of Breakout Rooms
A breakout room is a specific kind of tool in the meeting environment. The chances are that you won’t need to use this feature for smaller interactions when you’re having conversations with just a few people. However, for classroom settings and larger enterprise meetings, breakout rooms can help to keep digital discussions organised, and efficient.
Some of the biggest benefits of breakout rooms are:
A more intimate experience
When you break your teams into smaller meetings, it’s much easier for them to converse and talk about things naturally. In a huge meeting room full of dozens of people, it’s easy for certain members of staff to be drowned out by other, more confident people. Breakout rooms give every person in the organisation a chance to ensure their voice is heard.
In a breakout meeting, your employees can discuss issues that they might be too uncomfortable to mention in a space with a lot of people. These team members can also form stronger connections with their colleagues, so that they feel more comfortable in future interactions. Breakout sessions strengthen the “team” feeling within the digital landscape.
Improved meeting clarity
Sometimes, in large meetings, it’s easy for certain messages from other members of staff to be missed when everyone is talking. A smaller selection of breakout rooms means that companies can ensure their employees are hearing all the most important information that they need within the conversation. Supervisors and leaders in breakout rooms can even help different groups of employees to understand how changes or announcements apply to them.
You could create breakout rooms where specific departments can come together and discuss certain issues that may be essential to them but wouldn’t necessarily be relevant to other people within the larger group. This means that everyone has a chance to get more out of the meeting.
Everyone gets more involved
If you’ve ever been in a meeting with dozens or even hundreds of people at once, you might notice that a few people may not be as invested in the conversation as they would be in a smaller meeting. That’s because most employees know that their supervisors and managers aren’t going to be able to pay much attention to them in such a crowded session.
Whether it’s intentional or not, larger meetings can allow for some employees to stop paying as much attention to what’s going on in the conversation. People start to multi-task and get distracted by what’s going on elsewhere. Conferences with a smaller number of people eliminate this problem, helping people to share thoughts more freely, and encouraging everyone to get involved. When team members feel like they’re more “on display”, in a meeting, they’re more likely to contribute.
Natural bonding opportunities
Breakout rooms allow for natural bonding environments where team members can strengthen their connections to other members of staff. If you’re working with a hybrid or remote team right now, it may be difficult to create relationships between members of staff in the same way you usually would in an office.
A series of breakout rooms could be a great way to bring people together mid-meeting who might not talk otherwise. For companies who want to ensure that wellness remains a crucial focus in the company, and employees don’t feel isolated, this is an important step.
Save time and reduce confusion
When everyone has a chance to talk issues through in a more focused, strategic space, there’s less confusion in the larger meeting. People can jump into breakout rooms to ask questions without interrupting a presenter in the larger meeting space. They can discuss issues with colleagues and have discussions about next-action steps without having to wait for a chance to speak.
With breakout rooms, meetings can run more smoothly, and effectively. These are just another tool within the web conferencing world that could help us to collaborate in the age of remote and hybrid work.
Are you using breakout rooms for your company yet? Let us know on social media.
