Hybrid Meetings, the New Trend of the Conferencing Industry

A combination of an audio, web and video conference, hybrid meetings make your business more efficient with consequent money saving in the long term. For this reason, they are a growing trend in the conferencing industry. In this article, we will outline briefly the main features of this new way of hosting conferences.

How do you usually host your meetings? Maybe you have your preferred way; or, more probably, you choose among a web, audio or video conference according to each individual situation. What you should do is to use hybrid meetings instead. But what are hybrid meetings?

A hybrid meeting is simply a combination of an audio, web, and video conference at one time. They give managers the opportunity to hold meetings with a face-to-face component as well as a virtual component. In this way it becomes possible to change a meeting from a one-way dictation to something similar to a conversation among several people. Participants may exchange messages with each other in background, for example by Twitter, and see them shown on a screen in real time. This is crucial especially for the new generation of millennia's, who are used to take an active role during a conference.

The main benefits of hybrid meetings are an increased flexibility and participation against decreased costs. Let’s see why.

• An increased flexibility is a natural consequence of the fact that the participants have more ways to join your meeting, being they able to choose the most convenient among personal attendance, phone call or web chat through pc.
• An increased participation is not only the immediate consequence of an increased flexibility, but also an indirect effect of the augmented interactivity among speakers and participants. The conference becomes similar to a group discussion, where not only every participant can actively contribute, but he is also naturally led to be more attentive.
• Cost savings come from the opportunity to avoid paying per minute conference costs through the utilization of the computer audio.

Another important effect of hybrid meetings is the team productivity improvement, being staff members more involved and subsequently more motivated.

However, hybrid meetings are still an emerging media that is far from having disclosed all its potentialities. As meeting professionals continue to experiment with this new media, new opportunities will be found.

If you would like to learn more about how hybrid meetings can benefit your business, please visit R-HUB website http://www.collaboration-technologies.co.uk, where you will find more resources.