Microsoft has embarked on a mission to design more inclusive and collaborative hybrid meeting rooms.
In doing so, it's experimenting with new styles of furniture, audio-visual technology, and room positioning.
As it does so, the tech giant is deploying a new hybrid setup within some of its medium-sized and small meeting rooms.
For instance, it is doing so at ‘The Hive’, Microsoft’s headquarters campus in Redmond, Washington.
While Microsoft tinkers with such environments, it is developing a set of what it hopes will become new global audiovisual standards.
As a recent blog post by the tech giant explains, these standards detail how various elements within a meeting room should interact and intersect with one another.
Matt Hempey, Principal Program Manager with Microsoft Digital Employee Experience, an organization that helps employees interact with digital tools in the workplace, describes his experience as part of the team working at The Hive: "We want to create an environment that is halfway between the physical and virtual.
"These rooms represent the kind of hybrid experiences that we can deploy at scale around the world.
"We dedicated this space to really rethink how the meeting room should be redesigned to optimize for a hybrid.
"We cleared out all the tables and all the tech and just started with a blank slate."
Hempey also gave his assessment of Teams:
As we work across our rooms to make them optimised for hybrid, Microsoft Teams gives us the platform that allows us to be flexible, to deploy the right experience, with the right equipment, for each audience in each space.
The Latest Hybrid Meeting Room Design
Although the pandemic helped to drive more equitable meeting room solutions for remote attendees, with many employees back in the office, Microsoft believes it needs to reimagine the workplace design once again.
