What equipment-related challenges have you faced with hybrid meetings?
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We were fortunate to have refreshed our meeting rooms just before the pandemic, so technology has not been our issue. Training our staff on the use of this updated hardware has been our greatest challenge.
For our board meetings, the first true hybrid meeting "back" on-site was not well done. This was actually less of an equipment issue, and more of a preparation issue. The meeting was conducted as if it was a fully in-person meeting. This left those attending remotely very confused as to who was talking, and in some cases, what was really going on. The meeting room is large and has a sensitive microphone system as well as a video camera; the tech worked, but we didn't work with it. For future hybrid meetings, everyone brought a device who was in-person, and signed onto Zoom there - all while muting their speakers and mics. This allowed the remote attendees to see who was speaking. Of course, this approach calls into question the efficacy of in-person attendance in such a scenario!
Our real problems arise when doing hybrid meetings with different companies, is not uncommon to find they use a different platform / protocols that make it very difficult to interconnect, so we end up using their platform or they use ours...
I would say that bandwidth and microphones are the greatest challenges. You never have too much speed or too high quality of audio. As the pandemic dragged on, I think more and more people have turned off the video. I agree with that, because aside from the personal affect it can be a bit of a distraction, especially when you already know the people you are conferencing with.
We faced challenges with microphones as most of our employees while attending the meeting were using their personal microphones which were not capable of noise cancellations and in some cases our users were not able to put virtual background (device specific issues) while working from home.