When improvising works just as well or if not even better

In the Digital Team we are offering the team the opportunity to join monthly team meetings in person as well as virtually. We have a new booking system to book meeting rooms which includes the teams hybrid meeting equipment with TV’s, cameras, speakers and a teams display. However on the day we couldn’t use the room as planned and no other rooms were available with the teams equipment included 😥.

What we did………
So with no camera or link to join the Teams meeting via the normally attached teams device we connected Poppy Dunn’s laptop to the TV using Ctrl + K, positioned the laptop on a stool under the TV, joined the meeting via the laptop, borrowed a speaker from ICT and muted our sound on our laptops to avoid feedback. Poppy could still type into the chat bar using Teams on her phone and make notes so wasn’t disadvantaged.

We made use of spotlighting to highlight Poppy’s screen with us all in the room at County Hall. It was great seeing everyone on the screen and the presentation as well as being able to make notes using OneNote to refer back to.

We had a great presentation from Laura Yarrow all about maturing user centred design. The Team were really interested and asked lots of great questions. Having a positive speaker on a topic everyone could really relate to really helped motivate the team.

We also designed an icebreaker to remind the team of the importance of updating their Delve profiles (being role models) and to increase the adoption of using it. We asked everyone to find the person in the team with the most interesting profile.

If you find yourself in a similar situation have a go or use this story to think outside the box. Have you tried holding a team meeting which needs to be hybrid outside yet, learn more about this from Lisa Trickey Our first hybrid team session. Last week we had a go at our first… | by Lisa Trickey | Digital Dorset | Medium

Take aways…..
The team preferred the room layout as they felt like they were in the room due to the configuration , could we review our other meeting rooms to create a similar environment?

Always have a plan B or use your creative thinking to experiment.