What is a hybrid meeting and why has it become so popular?
How the Corona virus pandemic has changed the meeting industry like nothing ever before.
Have you come access the term "hybrid meeting" but you don’t exactly know what it is? Then keep on reading, this is going to be exciting.
A hybrid meeting is a type of hybrid event, like a hybrid conference, a hybrid seminar or a hybrid trade show.
It combines a "live" in person meeting with actual on-site participants and a "virtual" component, meaning participants joining the meeting online.
The meeting takes place in a pre-determined destination, like like Bangkok, Shanghai, New York or London, yet the online participants could be joining the meeting from anywhere in the world, from their offices as well as from home.
Off-the-shelf communication platforms like Zoom, WebEx or Microsoft Teams were not overly popular in the pre-Covid world, and hybrid meetings were exorbitantly expensive and only a handful of top companies could afford to organize them.
During the pandemic, organizations have replaced face-to-face meetings with online meetings, and communication platforms were the big winners. It was the convenient because travel wasn't necessary and to keep the costs down.
Yet, holding online meetings for months on ends has a toll, and this is a feeling of isolation, detachment and boredom.
Therefore, who thinks face-to-face meetings are dead, think twice. Online meeting can never entirely replace face-to-face meetings. When people meet online, they often struggle to read facial expressions and body language, and do not take the occasion overly serious. A departmental morning brief is best done online, yet a regional meeting with country managers discussing strategy is better done face-to-face. Face-to-face meetings allow for clearer communication, as well as for team building purposes, with ice-breaker activities and exercises to align the team.
But with the pandemic, the world has changed. As of writing this blog post, intercontinental flights are still grounded, and flights within South-East Asia are about the resume within a month or two. Online meetings are still the norm, yet in due time, face-to-face meetings will experience a revival. And the revival comes in the form of hybrid meetings.
Hybrid meetings are especially useful when the world is in an economic crisis, when health hazards and uncertainty hang over your head like the sword of Damocles, in times of harsh immigration policies and when even business travelers experience difficulties to obtain travel visas.
Organizing a meeting with 30 people attending is much easier than 300, and it saves a helluva lot of money. Think in terms of the following case study:
Average spending for a 3 day / 2 night meeting and team building package in Bangkok is between 1,200 and 1,800 USD per participant, considering participants fly in from South-East Asia. This includes meeting, team building, gala dinner in a 4- or 5-star hotel. That's easily half a million USD for a group of 300 participants.
Now consider for a moment you are flying 30 people into the country and have the other 270 people join online, that may turn into savings of over 80%. And 80% of half-a million bucks is 400,000 USD, and which organization wouldn't like to save this amount of money?
When you attend a hybrid meeting, you have it both ways, you have your cake and it it too. You get the benefit of face-to-face meeting, that allows you to build your team with the most important executives, and you have a chance to communicate the most important messages online to your rank-and-file.
More information about Hybrid Meetings in Bangkok, Hybrid Team Building in Bangkok and Hybrid Team Building in Thailand please contact info(at)Beunite.com or send a message to my WhatsApp +66 84 629 05 07.