The goal of the Poly Experience Program is to create tailored briefing experiences for our customers to showcase how Poly’s professional-grade voice and video gear can solve their organization’s specific collaboration needs. To achieve this goal during a global pandemic that required more virtual and hybrid-style briefings, we dreamed up the idea to use a central camera to highlight multiple vignettes in a single space that could be adjusted quickly as needed – and our new virtual studio was born! Unlike the heavily engineered green-screen studios that we have used over the past 10 years, this re-imagined location features a unique theater-in-the-round format.

By mounting our own Poly videoconferencing technology atop a mobile cart positioned centrally in the briefing center, we can now easily swivel the camera to focus on different use-case setups that encircle the room, such as a home office, classroom, doctor’s office or a typical enterprise deployment.

The reimagining of our virtual studio briefing format lets us accommodate and tailor briefings for our customers across industries and locations. During the pandemic, we received an unprecedented number of virtual briefing requests from customers located in different countries. This inspired us to expand our Virtual Studio model by replicating this setup in Poly Experience Centers throughout the world so we can help more customers in more regions, and in more languages. For customers who aren’t located close to a physical Experience Center, virtual studios provide an opportunity to get a custom briefing experience with Poly.

Below is a 3-minute video that demonstrates the Virtual Experience Studio space and functionality. The demonstration is hosted by Lillian Trinh, Virtual Experience Manager at Poly.

Simplicity Through Design and Décor

The success of the Virtual Experience Studio is due to the simplicity of its design. We chose not to incorporate extra digital media or control panels that we had used in the past. Instead, we stripped down the experience and focused on using our own technology as both the demonstration vehicle and the product to be showcased.

Then, we relied on the simplest of accessories and décor to help illustrate our stories. Each set-up encircling the virtual experience studio is highly customizable. We have graphics with magnetic tape and a slat wall with adjustable shelves. This lets us alter the décor and details to make the demo environment specific to the application most relevant for our guests. For example, the Healthcare setup (pictured below) can quickly be switched to an education setup by rolling away the medical cart and adding a jar of pencils. The process is amazingly simple and extremely impactful.

A virtual briefing is an excellent step toward finding the ideal solution for your organization’s needs and work styles. To schedule a personalized demonstration, contact your Poly Account Manager or Partner.

For more information, visit the Poly Experience Program page on our website.

Renée Niebylski is a leadership representative with the Association of Briefing Program Managers and the Director of Poly’s Global Experience Program. 

Can you smell the freshly sharpened #2 pencils? My daughter is one of the many children who have recently returned to school this season, and we are again faced with interesting opportunities and challenges at the outset of a new year. 

To gain a better understanding of what school administrators are facing as they prepare for the unconventional hybrid-learning school year ahead, I spoke with Melissa Bisbo (M.Ed.), who is Poly’s Experience Program Theater Lead for the Americas.  

Melissa’s perspective on the shift to hybrid learning and virtual technology education is special. As a former elementary school teacher, Melissa spent more than a decade in classrooms across America, from Pennsylvania to Texas to New York. Now in her role at Poly, Melissa consults with different school administrators across the country every week on how to make virtual learning easier for staff and students.  

This conversation is a culmination of best practices and key learnings that can help school administrators prepare for the classroom of the future. 

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Q: In your conversations with school administrators over the past year, what were some of the challenges that came with the shift to virtual and hybrid learning? How did the school staff overcome those challenges? 

A: One of the biggest challenges that educators have been facing with virtual and hybrid learning is how best to provide a quality education and keep students engaged in their learning, all while keeping students and staff safe. When many schools shifted to virtual learning, teachers and students were struggling with the lack of live instruction and how to adapt their teaching to be over video. We have been able to provide solutions for educators that improve the remote teaching experience by allowing them to step away from their laptops and teach as they normally would, whether they are in the classroom or instructing from home. Even those students who may be learning remotely have an experience on par with the students in the classroom because they are seeing and hearing the teacher clearly, which leads to greater engagement.  

Watch as I demonstrate the Poly Studio USB camera technology – it’s perfect whether a teacher is in the classroom or teaching from home. With automated speaker training, educators can forget about the technology in the room and just teach. 

Q: What are some of the obstacles that students are facing? What role can technology play to help address those issues? 

A: Students learning from home are faced with obstacles of their own. One of the biggest challenges of virtual learning is how to keep students engaged despite the distractions happening around them. Video enabling classrooms encourages interaction and collaboration, but many students are trying to learn from home. Often, these students must share a space with other siblings and/or parents, and the noise and distraction can make it hard to concentrate on the school lessons. When using Poly headsets, equipped with features such as noise-canceling and acoustic fence technology, students can join their virtual classroom and focus on the lesson being taught and not the distracting noises that may be occurring around them. With Poly solutions, they can be clearly heard and seen as they engage in discussions and ask questions.  

Q: What are the challenges of virtual or hybrid learning in other countries? 

A: With the education model shifting between in-person and virtual, teachers around the world are faced with the same challenge of maintaining connections with their students and how best to support their learning. But the differences and distinctions between countries lie in the timing of the school openings and closings, and the degree to which an institution has its doors open or closed. In some countries, there have already been multiple school re-openings and re-closings, while in other countries schools have been closed for most of the pandemic. In the U.S., we’ve had fewer cycles of openings and closings than in other countries. Regardless of location, the subsequent learning loss is a challenge for everyone involved. 

Q: As a former teacher, what tips would you give to educators in the field? What have you learned from the technology industry that you might be able to use if you were teaching in a virtual or hybrid environment today? 

A: As a former educator with many friends who are still teachers, I feel fortunate to work for a company that is passionate about helping educators navigate the world of virtual and hybrid learning. Even amid what was or may have seemed like the insurmountable task of tackling virtual learning, I would pass along that it doesn’t have to be intimidating. If teachers, students, and administrators are equipped with the right tools, virtual and hybrid learning experiences can be engaging no matter where they are located.  

Here are some education-related case studies for your reference: Pennsylvania Public Schools, New Jersey Public Schools, Aalborg University, and KORU Independent AP Academy 

Melissa, thank you for your time today. On your annual report card, Poly rates your Experience Program an A+! 

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Engaging people, making deeper connections, and creating equality of experience is what Poly does for our customers every day across industries, so you can get more done. With powerful collaboration products and services, no one is better than Poly at helping people work together. For more information on how to build the classroom of the future, visit the Poly Solutions for Education page. To schedule your own personalized demonstration today, contact your Poly Account Manager or Partner. 

Renée Niebylski is a leadership representative with the Association of Briefing Program Managers and the Director of Poly’s Global Experience Program. 

Melissa Bisbo is a former elementary school teacher who spent more than a decade educating students at schools across America. She now serves as the Briefing and Demonstration Theater Lead for the Americas at Poly. 

The past 15 months have been a constant state of preparation. We prepared to close our doors to customers, prepared for lockdown, prepared for a completely virtual program and now we are preparing to reopen our offices to support a new era of hybrid work.

Like many others in the briefing program industry, as Poly prepares to reopen our doors to in-person customer visits we are wrestling with important considerations: How do we create and implement successful hybrid staffing models for our briefing program? What program resources or staffing roles does our organization need to fill?

We tackled these questions at the recent virtual conference for the Association of Briefing Program Managers (ABPM). For this event, I co-led a session with my esteemed colleague Pamela Evans, an experienced briefing program leader. Together, we hosted a discussion that focused on resourcing and staffing briefing programs amid COVID 19.

What is a Hybrid Briefing Experience?

During the presentation, Pam and I posed questions to the group that we felt each program manager should ask themselves, such as: “What does ‘hybrid’ mean to you?” Since, when it comes to briefing formats, a hybrid can mean many different things. For example:

• all-virtual meetings
• all in-person meetings
• guests in-person with presenters joining virtually
• presenters in-person with guests joining virtually
• A mix of all the above!

If briefing managers focus their energy on finding the answer to what “hybrid” means to them and their company, it will be much easier to identify briefing program goals and successfully execute on strategy in a hybrid working world.

To me, hybrid can be all the above. However, what you can do successfully depends on the technology you have available for use. Poly has always had the capability to do a hybrid briefing experience program. We manage virtual experiences and in-person experiences, as well as experiences where some customers and/or presenters join virtually while others are on-site.

Hybrid Staffing

Now as vaccination rates begin to climb, I am seeing diverse actions across how my industry peers are organizing their briefing program resources and staffing. Many companies are not looking to open their doors to in-person engagements for quite a few months. They have successfully moved to virtual briefings and plan to stay virtual for the foreseeable future. Other companies, like Poly, are ready to open doors a bit sooner (in accordance with local health and safety regulations).

If your organization wants to do a hybrid briefing experience program, be prepared to staff up a team that can handle more complex scheduling and management logistics. In our case, Poly requires our experience managers to have a deep understanding of our products and how they are configured, so we can effectively run demonstrations for all meeting participants, no matter where they are located.

Cementing the Role of the Facilitator

If hybrid experiences are where your briefing program is headed, the role of the facilitator may need to evolve too. Traditionally, briefing facilitators are tasked with hosting the in-person guests and managing the flow of the day. In some briefing programs, including the one at Poly, briefing facilitators also conduct product demonstrations.

Organizations will need to decide if the facilitator should also be responsible for managing the participants on the video stream and the associated technical aspects of the meeting, such as setting up the dial-in logistics, keeping up with the chat, and helping remote participants with technical troubleshooting. It is a lot to take on.

When I asked the group at the virtual conference about the evolving role of the facilitator, some of my peer organizations worried that it would be difficult for a facilitator to manage all of the in-person and remote aspects of the meeting successfully.

My perspective is that it’s possible, given the right tools and training. At Poly, our facilitators manage it all. They’re able to do so because we see the onsite group as equals to the people who are joining on video. The key is for the facilitator to be trained on modern meeting tools and technology, which may include managing the chat to share questions and comments to engage all meeting participants and encourage conversations among everyone, regardless of their locations.

Briefing program directors should consider the extra workload that comes with a hybrid briefing approach, as sometimes it may require having two people staff a briefing, instead of one. One party to manage the technical logistics and a second to enable the conversation both in the room and online.

A New Role: Production Manager

Video conferencing is not new. Many companies, and quite a few briefing programs, already use the technology. However, systems are often set up in one direction, where guests face a camera that is mounted above or below a screen at the end of the room. However, if there is a presenter in the room, they’re often standing with their backs to the camera and monitors, which gives remote participants a sub-optimal view of the main speaker. There’s a better way to set up video in a briefing room so that participants, remote and in-person, have meeting equality. (As an example, check out the new Zoom Rooms Smart Gallery.)

For companies not already entrenched in video conferencing, the idea of integrating dedicated multi-directional video into a customer briefing can be daunting. But if your goal is to host customers on-site and still allow for virtual participants, it may be necessary.

The discussion at the conference then turned from whether to build or upgrade the room to figuring out how best to manage it. That’s where the idea of a Production Manager came into focus because while many of my peers have IT support, most do not have dedicated video support.

While video conferencing products have become very user-friendly, the small staff of Briefing Programs will likely still need a Production Manager to help with the video equipment, whether it’s in one room or many. Here are a few of the avenues through which my peers have found a Production Manager to support the video equipment portion of their briefing program:

• Corporate IT
• IT video operations division
• The executive support team
• Training an existing dedicated engineer to support video too

If you’re planning to implement multi-directional video into your briefing program, don’t forget to identify a Production Manager to help manage and support it.

Learning From Each Other

Overall, my experience co-leading a discussion for the ABPM community was a great learning experience for me. My view of how to operate in this hybrid world is based on the technology at my fingertips and the goals of my program. After all, by using the video equipment in this way, we are simultaneously presenting its value. However, my peers who run other programs have different business drivers, which brought about other key learnings and new technology needs over the past 15 months. It was refreshing and educational to learn more about the creative ways they have found success through the pandemic. I look forward to seeing how our programs evolve in the years ahead.

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For more information, visit the Poly Experience Program page on our website. To schedule your own personalized demonstration today, contact your Poly Account Manager or Partner.

Renée Niebylski is a leadership representative with the Association of Briefing Program Managers and the Director of Poly’s Global Experience Program. 

At the beginning of the pandemic, I was laser-focused ensuring the health and safety of my briefing team. Our team is no stranger to remote working and conducting virtual briefing experiences – we’ve been doing this for years – but this time it was different.

Prior to 2020, virtual experiences were used as an accent to provide focused, bite-sized demonstrations to our customers who may not be able to visit us in-person. It was never a core part of our briefing program strategy. When the shutdown and shelter-in-place orders came to bear, that all had to change.

There was so much we didn’t know about how things were going to unfold at that time. How could we re-create a virtual experience from a person’s home? Would it be professional enough? What would happen if our home internet couldn’t support video? What do we do when our kids inevitably walked into frame? The answers: simplicity and flexibility.

My amazingly creative team rallied as we moved our workstations into bedrooms, living rooms, and kitchens around the world, all the while keeping our focus on how we would continue to showcase Poly’s ease of use. “Simplicity and flexibility” became our team mantra. When I wrote the blog about briefing demonstrations from home in April, I thought, “This is temporary – we’ll be back in the office any day now.” That was almost nine months ago.

However, it hasn’t been all bad. As we opened the virtual door for customers to join us in our homes by video, we were taken aback and relieved by how much they loved the virtual experience. Words like “honest,” “refreshing,” and “surprisingly effective” were sent to us email after email. Additionally, we found that there is no better place to demo our work from home technology than from our homes!

Recently, some of my briefers have started hybrid working – returning to the office (alone) so they can host virtual experiences in a formal office setting. As the stay-at-home ordinances fluctuate, my team has embraced flexibility as they seamlessly bounce back to their home set-ups as needed – inherently demonstrating the flexibility and agility of our products.

Before 2020, our program was focused by ‘theater’ (aka geographical location). The silver lining of shifting from a theater-based program to one that is focused on providing a robust virtual experience has been that now we can meet with and provide services to more people – folks who hadn’t used our services previously due to their distance from a briefing center began booking us for virtual briefings. So, in the end, we’ve been able to help more companies and individuals find a bit of stability in the way they work amidst all the chaos. It continues to bring us joy to interact with colleagues and customers we’d never have had the chance to meet with before.

So, you can see this year has been a wild ride with ups and downs, but I believe it has created momentum and prepared us (and the briefing program industry as a whole) to be even more flexible in the years to come.

Here are my top predictions that will help briefing teams and their guests strategize for success in 2021 and beyond. 

1. The need for customer briefings will increase.

Eventually, workers will return to the office and they’ll be looking for guidance on how to make it easier for office-based workers to easily collaborate with colleagues and external parties who are still working remotely. Our briefing program is in a unique position to help customers see the possibilities, as we’ve set up dozens of demonstrations across multiple platforms that show how people can work more flexibly and be more productive with enterprise-grade products and solutions.

2. Virtual briefings are here to stay – and so are full Experience Centers.

There is a need for both formats, today and in the future. Does the customer need a quick and short demonstration? Then it makes sense to host a virtual briefing. But when it’s time for executive teams to talk strategy and full solutions, it is best to conduct a full experience tour in-person.

3. In-person briefings will take more time – and that’s a good thing.

The trend we’re seeing is that as more customers take the time to travel for briefing demonstrations (when possible), the duration of those briefings is extending. Prior to 2020, in-person briefings ranged from an hour to a full day. Now, nearly all of them are in the 4+ hour range. Why? Traveling to in-person meetings, even local travel, takes more planning and sometimes more resources, so customers are mindful about extracting the full value of their in-person interactions. The conversations are deeper, and the attention is more rapt.

4. Empathy-led briefings for deep customer understanding.

It took a year like 2020 for many companies to see the value in empathy-driven services. I see it as yet another silver lining, as it has shone a light on an opportunity for all of us to spend more time walking in each other’s shoes. Next year, and for many years to come, we’ll see more companies doubling down on creating briefing tours that are less show and tell’ and much more ‘experience with.’ This trend may have been discussed in the past, but it has become the standard in a short period of time.

At Poly, our consultative empathy-led conversations often evolve around employee workstyle personas and preferences, so that our customers can plan for better deployments and see higher technology adoption rates. We’re rolling out some fresh persona research findings early next year – stay tuned for more.

As more briefing programs embrace virtual formats and lead with empathy, we’ll all be better equipped to navigate a new world together in 2021 and beyond. I look forward to seeing you, whether on video or in-person. For more information or to schedule your own personalized demonstration today, contact your Poly Account Manager or Partner.

Renée Niebylski is a leadership representative with the Association of Briefing Program Managers and the Director of Poly’s Global Experience Program. 

Outfitting your organization with the right technology for collaboration is no small task. With the wealth of options and variations available, there truly is no better way to make an informed decision than to get up close and personal with the products. For this reason, Poly has ten experience centers dotted around the globe to immerse you in our end-to-end portfolio of industry-leading video, voice and content solutions.

Our Experience Managers work with visitors to tailor solutions to their organization’s unique needs, while demoing distinctive features that set Poly’s technology apart from the competition and allowing for a bit of hands-on playtime with our products.

However, as social distancing measures went into place around the world, our Experience Managers were challenged to rethink the ways in which our global customers could experience the full Poly portfolio with everyone safely in their homes. Demonstrating from home presented a set of new challenges — from small spaces, close quarters with family, to general difficulty replicating the environments in which some products would be used in.

Poly’s solutions are all about connecting people, so we’re fortunate that our homes can serve as a suitable demonstration environment. During this unprecedented time, we’ve been able to construct a methodology for meeting with customers regardless of their locations, while simultaneously offering an empathetic perspective for our partners and customers to meet them where they are.

As many organizations rush to outfit their workforce to work from home, what better way to demonstrate how our solutions work than from a home. Despite the befitting environment, this still required our managers and visitors to meet in an inherently intimate setting — their homes. At times, efforts to demonstrate Poly’s leading noise-cancelling technology featured on the Poly Studio X family or our Voyager headsets goes as far as inviting family members to join in – offering a genuine example of our new shared reality.

The generosity, flexibility and vulnerability our Experience Managers have offered in using their home environments to meet with visitors has strengthened our client relationships and has proven to be a value as opposed to a hindrance. Moreover, it has taught us that the truth in which we are living doesn’t necessarily obstruct our demonstrations but rather exhibits how Poly technologies can truly support any and every business.

Demonstration of the Poly Calisto 7200 Bluetooth speakerphone

Without a doubt, this global health crisis has been stressful, transformative and everything in between. At Poly, we have maintained our commitment to keeping our employees safe and truly practicing what we preach when it comes to remote working. We will continue to support our clients and partners in navigating the obstacles presented and join in the celebration of wins big and small.

For more information or to schedule your own personalized demonstration today, contact your Poly Account Manager or Partner.