Building A Truly Equitable Meeting Experience
In the past two years under the influence of the pandemic, people's work style has changed dramatically.Hybrid working has gradually become the mainstream work mode. To make the communication in different workplaces more smooth and efficient, and to give each employee an equitable meeting experience, it is very important to ensure the high quality of video conferencing.
The importance of an equitable meeting experience
An equitable meeting experience is to ensure that everyone, wherever or whenever they join the meeting, will have a similar experience during the meeting and have the same chance to voice their opinions and make an impact.
Under the hybrid working policy, where everyone is not in the same physical space, it is important to have a channel for instant communication. Video conferencing is the most feasible channel. In a low-quality video conference, there are always some participants who cannot be heard or even seen clearly, which makes it difficult for them to actively participate in the discussion and makes the conference an inefficient one. When everyone can join a video conference quickly and easily, and be heard and seen clearly, everyone feels respected and included. It makes the company culture motivated to express their ideas and suggestions on the meeting topic more often. Therefore, providing an equitable meeting experience for all attendees and ensuring smooth collaboration are essential for companies to maintain business operations when facilitating the hybrid working policy.
How to build an equitable meeting experience
To build an equitable meeting experience, you can start with three areas:
1.Ensure that each participant is heard and seen
Whether in a small meeting room or a large conference room, trying to achieve that everyone can be seen and heard is not an easy task. In a small meeting space, when you use basic conference equipment, the other party can only see the person in the middle, and other participants can only appear in half of the picture at most. When they speak, you need to manually adjust the angle of the camera to make them fully appear in the picture. Don’t want the manual adjustments? Then everyone needs to be huddled around the device! Such an experience is inequitable or unproductive. This is especially true in large conference rooms, where people sitting far away from the equipment are hard to be seen, and can barely be heard.
So to achieve equality in meetings, you need to ensure that the video conferencing equipment supports high resolution so that the video quality is good enough; is equipped with a wide-angle camera to accommodate more people in the field of view; and has a long voice pick-up range to capture the sound from a distance. If you can realize the above, you have successfully taken a very important first step toward an equitable meeting experience.
2.Ensure clear close-ups of each speaker as they speak
The second step in building an equitable meeting experience is to make sure that everyone who speaks is well captured.The device should provide a clear close-up to ensure that their expressions and body movements won’t be missed.
So what about when there are multiple people taking turns speaking or discussing? Manually adjusting the camera angle as well as zooming in & out is certainly not practical nor timely, and the meeting experience will be greatly compromised. If we have an intelligent device that can automatically frame the speaker when a single person speaks, and smoothly switch between multiple speakers, then we can provide a better meeting experience for each participant and take a step further towards building an equitable meeting experience.
3. Ensure that everyone has free access to their usual meeting software
Everyone has a prefered video conferencing software - either because they are used to it or their device has specs limitations. Based on this situation, an open and highly compatible video conferencing environment can well ensure the meeting experience of these people. In addition, when communicating with external personnel or customers, respecting their habits of using video conferencing software and providing them with an equitable meeting experience can also help you establish professionalism and trust, quickly bringing you closer to the other person and starting an efficient and equitable conversation.
Devices to help you build an equitable meeting experience
Nexvoo has developed the N149 and N120U to offer an equitable meeting experience so that participants do not feel "left out" and non-existent. The N149 is a video conferencing camera for small rooms and the N120U is a video conferencing bar for medium to large conference rooms. Both Nexvoo devices support 4K UHD resolution and are equipped with a 120° ultra-wide FOV camera for high video quality and a wide field of view. With a voice pickup distance of 16 feet for the N149 and 26 feet for the N120U, there is enough coverage for small and large conference rooms.
Also, both devices feature AI-powered speaker tracking and auto framing function, which work together to capture participants and speakers in the conference room. They can automatically switch and frame in real-time to focus on the speaker, ensuring that all participants are included and presenting the best view. In that way, an equitable meeting experience is ensured for everyone. The Nexvoo N149 and N120U are compatible with most conferencing software, so you can select the video conferencing software you want to use on your personal device.
Best of all, at $499 for the N149 and $999 for the N120U, they are cost-effective options compared with similar devices!