With the right technology in place, taking a hybrid approach to working can mean getting the best from both worlds.

It looks likely that with hybrid work, there will always be co-located remote and office meeting participants. So how will virtual collaboration advance this more permanent way of working and make life easier for end users? We spoke to Jeff Smith, Head of Zoom Rooms to hear about what his team is doing to help people work more flexibly and how they are putting measures in place to improve the overall experience for employees.

Let’s start this logically —with the people it impacts most. How do we help the end user get the best possible experience? One of the core principles of Zoom is being able to deliver a baseline experience that users are delighted by. That is one of the biggest challenges the industry has faced and Zoom has done a fairly good job at it; raising the bar of the baseline experience. It really is a challenge because the variability between inexperience relative
to hardware is huge.

How you choose to listen matters

People have a wide-ranging audio experience, whether that’s through a headset, an audio peripheral or just their laptop or endpoint themselves. Companies like Jabra are developing hardware that can deliver that last mile experience for the Zoom service; gaining access to telemetry and data we can expose at an aggregate level to IT teams is absolutely fantastic.

Keeping people motivated for better connections

Raising the bar on quality is one of the easiest ways to reduce the level of video or meeting fatigue. When it comes to audio, for example, having narrow band, low quality, high noise audio is exhausting to interact with. The amount of cognitive effort we have in interacting with something like that is huge and it makes it very difficult to have a worthwhile conversation. Instead, everything becomes much more transactional.

Raising the bar on quality of audio, video and making that a much more natural and immersive experience can help to reduce that level of fatigue. The connection part of it is interesting – what would happen if we were physically in the office and having unscripted interactions? That’s why we’re looking at ways to leverage the asynchronous communication ability in our chat with Zoom Presence, notifications and with more connection features outside of the real time communication – we’re exploring it all.