Improved hybrid meeting experience in Outlook


  • Staff

 Outlook Blog:

Outlook has now an improved hybrid meeting experience which gives you more options on how to manage and organize your meetings. This improved experience adds an option to mark an event as an in-person event, with this meeting organizers can request in-person attendance and attendees can RSVP confirming if they can indeed participate in person or if they can only make it virtually.

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You will start seeing this this feature first in the new Outlook for Windows and the web experience in late March 2024.

Organize a meeting and request in-person attendance​

Many meetings are set up in a hybrid environment but sometimes it might make sense to ask people to attend in person. When organizing a meeting, the organizer can mark the meeting as in-person by selecting the In-Person event toggle next to the location field.

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Although the organizer is marking the event as "in-person", they can also add a Teams meeting for those people who are not able to make it into the office and still want to participate.

Respond (RSVP) to a meeting invite with in-person request​

When someone receives a meeting invite marked as an in-person event, they will now see an additional option when RSVPing "Yes" - instead of just one "Yes" option, you will now see three. Choose "Yes, in-person" if you plan to attend the meeting in-person as requested by the organizer, "Yes, virtually" if you would like to attend, but cannot make it in-person, or select "Yes" - with no attendance mode information - in case you prefer to confirm participation, but not disclose how you will attend.

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Track in-person responses​

As attendees respond to an in-person request, the organizer can track responses in the tracking pane, which displays each person's attendance preference along with their response.

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If you want to follow the status of this feature, you can keep track of it in the Microsoft 365 roadmap.

We hope this feature will improve your hybrid meeting experience, make managing your calendar easier, and help with your time management tasks.

Cheers!


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My personal experience with Teams meetings is that hybrid meetings are really ineffective.

Reality is those in the actual meeting room dominate, and remote attendees barely get a look in.

Worse still is if the meeting chairman does not crack down on multiple conversations. The sensitive microphone needed to transmit speech in room to remote attendees picks up all the multiple conversation and they get mixed together.
Remotely, it is like trying to listen to a conversation in a noisy pub.

All my colleagues agree - all persons should attend where possible, or meeting can be entirely remote, and that hybrid meetings are the worst option.

When all remote, our convention is everybody is muted (chairman can do that of people do not behave) and people raise their virtual hand to speak.

Ok, one can argue it is a poor chairman that allows a hybrid meeting to fall apart, but regrettably managing people is sometimes like trying to herd cats.

Ok, hybrid meetings are not always possible to avoid, particularly if people live a long way apart, but some real discipline can help to ameliorate some of the common issues.

We once had a hybrid meeting that was not working well, and chairman split the "home" team into four smaller teams and each team had to dial in as a remote team (from different conference rooms). The meeting went much better as all remote members got a fair crack at being involved.
 

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