Breakout Rooms Benefits from PicCollage’s POV
Online communication is not new to the PicCollage team — we’ve supported remote work since before the pandemic, allowing members to work flexibly from different places worldwide. We believe that talent is everywhere & we love to enrich our company by hiring employees with diverse backgrounds. As a result, we’re familiar with almost all of the online video conferencing tools that help us communicate with one another regardless of our location.
Besides the basic features — screen sharing, chat, screen recording, and polls — one feature that we always use in our virtual meetings is the breakout room. This feature allows users to create smaller meetings within the main meeting where users are “broken out” into smaller groups to discuss a specific subject. At PicCollage, we use breakout rooms all the time — our weekly team meetings & demos, project & function syncs, daily standup, free discussions, 1:1 coaching chats, and external events like interviews & online mixers.
Not every meeting needs breakout rooms, but we‘ve discovered a number of benefits to using them as a way to facilitate conversations in our internal team discussions & external online events. Here are just a few of them:
Increased participation & collaboration
Unlike a big meeting where there’s usually a spotlight for the main speaker while the others are more like audience members, breakout discussions have smaller settings with a smaller number of people, making the discussions more inclusive and engaging. This way, members are encouraged to contribute to conversations, share ideas, have their voices heard, and build on each other’s thoughts, leading to more productive and collaborative discussions.
PicCollage has a weekly project demo where everyone gets updated about what’s happening in each department. We all gather in the big “meeting room” and we begin the demo by sharing each project’s updates. After the sharing is done, we create different rooms & split up to follow up on the different projects. With a smaller group in the breakout rooms, everyone has more freedom to provide ideas & feedback than with a large group where everyone can hear them. This creates a better environment for open and honest communication. Moreover, it’s easier for project members to keep the discussion on track, follow up, and make sure everyone has a chance to share their opinions.
More meaningful conversations
Rather than going through the details of each topic with everyone in the big meeting room (which might be irrelevant for some team members), breakout rooms allow for a more focused discussion on specific topics or tasks. Members can scatter & enter a room to dig deeper into a topic of particular interest to them, making the conversation more personalized and meaningful. Even more than that, all these conversations are happening simultaneously! This way, members can save time & energy to do something that’s more valuable than sitting through a long meeting that doesn’t really concern them.
A tool we use daily, called MixerChat, allows hosts AND participants to create & freely hop around to different rooms & join conversations that actually matter to them. For example, during PicCollage’s project demo, we have rooms for different subjects where attendees can jump in to catch up on that specific topic. Click here to try MixerChat out for yourself!
Various perspectives & ideas
By bringing together a diverse group of people to discuss a problem or issue, breakout discussions can facilitate better decision-making by considering multiple perspectives and ideas. However, gathering all these people is tricky since everyone has different schedules. With breakout rooms, teams only need to dedicate a certain amount of time for everyone to join together, stay on the call & split into different rooms to directly follow up on the ideas discussed in the meeting. There’s no need to create an entirely separate meeting to catch up on the topic, and all the discussions can happen simultaneously.
Of course, there are other benefits that we didn’t mention. For our hybrid team, breakout rooms have helped us make online conversations not only more productive & efficient but also more human — online breakout rooms give us a similar feeling to breaking out into different meeting rooms in real life. So, have you tried using breakout rooms? Share with us how you use them & what you think!
