Bring your own meeting: the benefits of BYOM in hybrid meetings

Remember phone conferencing? It’s amazing how video has pushed this technology to the background almost completely. Today, video has become the most important medium for conferencing. Although we all have become more digitally confident, and though we’re using video to collaborate with remote and in-office colleagues all the time, it’s clear that the hybrid meeting user is expecting more of their technology. BYOM is the logical next step in this evolution, and it’s bringing video conferencing to a higher level. 

Just because everyone likes to use video for conference calls doesn’t mean that the meeting experience is always a pleasant one. Conferencing technology and different types of AV equipment may be able to facilitate more productive meetings, but meeting users still experience frictions with technology for hybrid video conferences:

• A common heard frustration is that different meeting rooms often have different meeting room equipment, and it’s not always clear how to set things up. In many organizations, there is no uniform user experience.
  
• When you are calling with a client or a supplier, you may be forced to use different UC&C solutions. This may not always be easy to combine with the existing meeting room equipment.
  
• Meeting participants may need to move rooms, but still want to remain in their existing video call. Quite often, it’s impossible to benefit from the AV equipment in the different rooms.

BYOM – the new standard for video conferencing

Today, the focus is shifting towards a BYOM-style of video conferencing. With BYOM (Bring Your Own Meeting), employees adopt a huddle-like, unplanned way of working. They use their own device to host a video conference, and their preferred conferencing software (e.g. Microsoft Teams, WebEx, Zoom or other).

At the same time, they can benefit from the available audio and video peripherals of the meeting space they are in. With BYOM, they can choose to ignore the existing room system equipment provided by IT to connect with remote participants.

The rise of BYOM didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s a natural extension of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) in the workplace. BYOD refers to the trend of employees using their own personal devices for work purposes and to connect to the company networks and work-related systems. Personal devices could include laptops, smartphones, or tablets.

BYOM has made conferencing and collaboration part of a more informal, ad hoc and less structured workstyle, currently trending in enterprises all over the globe. BYOM is expanding rapidly and different factors are driving this trend:

• Employees are more productive and more empowered when they can use their own devices at work.
  
• We typically avoid using equipment that we don’t understand or find difficult to operate. With BYOM, workers have much less technology stress when starting up a hybrid meeting.
• Employees prefer a particular conferencing solution – one with an intuitive user experience that appeals to them or fits most closely with how they like to work.