How to Use Breakout Rooms in RingCentral to Enhance Collaboration
If you’ve ever been in a meeting session where the meeting host split the attendees into smaller groups to discuss or brainstorm topics, then you’ll be familiar with the idea of a breakout room.
RingCentral app lets you set up as many breakout sessions as you need, whether that’s a small number of breakout rooms or as many as 50 different rooms.
Before we get into the helpful features RingCentral’s breakout rooms offer, let’s take a closer look at what breakout rooms are.
What Is a Breakout Room?
A breakout room is a sub-group within a video call’s main session. Its purpose is to allow small groups to break off from the main room without having to set up separate sessions for every discussion that takes place away from the whole group.
You can use breakout rooms for various reasons. In a virtual classroom setting, you might employ them to enable groups of students to work on projects or assignments together. Business meeting hosts can use breakout rooms similarly to help individual teams discuss a topic before feeding back to the main meeting.
Manage RingCentral Breakout Rooms – Features
If you decide to allocate participants to rooms manually, RingCentral will allow you to pre-assign participants. You’re also able to choose not to assign a given individual to a breakout room. In this case, that person will stay in the main room.
When you’re setting up your breakout rooms, you don’t need to leave their names titled as ‘Breakout Room 1, 2, 3’. You should rename each one so that the room name reflects the topic of the discussion to which that specific room is dedicated.
You can also delete breakout rooms at any point. This feature is listed next to the ‘rename’ option.
You can move participants to different rooms at any given point. You can choose to move however many participants you’d like. RingCentral app also gives you the option to swap participants around to trade places in their respective breakout rooms.
If you’re looking to reset your current breakout rooms, you can choose to ‘Recreate Breakout Rooms’. This allows you to create breakout rooms to replace all currently existing rooms. You can also adjust the number of rooms you need when you use this function.
When you click on ‘Add a Room’, you’ll be able to add new breakout rooms to your session.
You can click on ‘Open All Rooms’ to see a list of all of the participants who haven’t joined any breakout rooms yet.
After navigating to the specific breakout room you’re looking to join, you’ll want to select ‘Join’. This lets you join breakout rooms after their initial creation, even if you were initially assigned to a different room.
RingCentral’s breakout room features include the option to send a message to every participant across all rooms. You can do this by clicking on ‘Broadcast a message to all’ and then typing your message.
Clicking on the ‘Close All Rooms’ button starts a countdown that gives every participant precisely one minute to leave their breakout room.
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Reasons to Use a Breakout Room
1. It allows for better collaboration.
Breakout rooms make it easier for individuals to discuss specific subtopics, which helps make the process of collaboration smoother overall.
For example, if your team is working on a large-scale project, breakout rooms give smaller sub-groups the chance to talk about individual aspects or parts of the project. One room might be dedicated to discussing deadlines, while another focuses on preparing a presentation about the project proposal. A third might also be set up to help managers assign roles.
The result of having all of these simultaneous discussions is more streamlined, efficient meetings. Along with the ability to feed back to a larger group at the end of any session, they create an environment that facilitates collaborative work.
2. It improves socialising among colleagues and participants.
It can be intimidating to ask for help when you feel like you’re the only one with a question among a large number of participants in a virtual meeting. That’s where breakout rooms come in.
Rooms with only a small number of people provide a more friendly environment for asking questions, training, and socialising. Participants won’t feel like they’ve got the attention of potentially hundreds of others when they’re trying to start a casual conversation. Instead, breakout rooms let you create a more casual virtual environment, where the pressure is off, and colleagues can socialise comfortably.
3. It enhances engagement.
When you’re able to move smoothly from a conferencing set-up—with one person speaking and everyone else listening—to a tutorial environment in a breakout room, it’s easier to hold your attendees’ attention.
Changing up the format of meetings provides some variety in the way you present information and thereby holds employees’ focus for longer. Even the most attentive listeners can’t always concentrate on long meetings where they’re expected to keep silent and listen exclusively. Breakout rooms give participants a chance to share their thoughts and expertise. This drives engagement and ensures that listening becomes less demanding when attendees do return to the main room.
How to enable Breakout Rooms on RingCentral
You can choose to enable breakout rooms across your entire RingCentral account, provided you have admin access. Below is a step-by-step guide on how to do so:
Step 1: First, you must log in to the RingCentral Online account using admin login details.
Step 2: Once you’ve logged in, you’ll be able to see the Admin Portal. Navigate to the following tabs: Meetings → Meetings Settings → Meeting
Step 3: Scroll down within this tab. You’re searching for the In Meeting (Advanced) section.
Step 4: There will be a toggle next to ‘Breakout Room’. Click this toggle, and breakout rooms will be enabled across the RingCentral Online account.
After you’ve enabled access to the breakout room option for the entire account, you can start using breakout rooms in your meetings. Please note that you will not be able to use both the Breakout Rooms and Remote Support features at the same time in one meeting. So, if you’re looking to use the former, please disable the latter.
If you’d like to toggle breakout rooms for your own meetings, follow the steps as outlined above, and log in using your own details instead of admin details.
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Tips for managing a Breakout Room
Make sure you create an environment that promotes and encourages discussion among your participants. If your groups are too large, participants might feel intimidated; if they’re too small, participants may feel put on the spot. The key is to find a good balance between these two extremes.
Encouraging discussion can also mean leaving breakout room participants to discuss without you sometimes. That is to say, once you’ve kickstarted the discussion, it can be helpful to leave your attendees to talk amongst themselves so they feel less pressure.
You’ll want to ensure participants know about every functionality they can make use of. For example, your participants should be aware that they can move across breakout rooms if need be, so they can join different conversations and share ideas from one breakout room with the members of another.
Letting them know that the breakout rooms’ names can be changed can also be more helpful than you might expect. Allowing teams to pick a name for their room together can make them feel more united to work towards a common cause.
It can take some time for a discussion to get going. If you want your participants to have meaningful conversations, you’ve got to make sure they have the time to do so.
A great way to figure out how much time to set aside to allow discussions to flourish is to test this. In other words, before the actual virtual meeting involving all attendees, it can help if you and your co-hosts trial discussions of the topics in the time you’ve allotted.
It can be helpful to set an upper and lower limit for the size of each room, so no one is left to discuss things with only one partner, for example.
While it’s a great idea to let the sizes of groups fluctuate based on the chosen topic of discussion and the needs of the participants, you as the host should maintain some control over this in the process. That can mean anything from only allowing a set number of participants to switch rooms per half an hour to having participants ask for permission before switching.
Either way, the important thing is that you’re able to keep the sizes of your groups within the desired range.
Make meetings better with RingCentral’s Breakout Rooms
Whether you’ve been using Breakout Rooms for months or whether this will be your first time, it’s essential to know what you want from the feature.
If you’re already aware that you’re going to need more than 20 breakout rooms per meeting, any service you consider has to be able to host large numbers of rooms. Why opt for a workaround solution when you could choose a provider that lets you host up to 50 breakout rooms at a time without the need to install an extra add-on?
Similarly, you may be in a situation where not every participant in your virtual meetings has access to a laptop or desktop. In that case, you should consider hosting meetings on a platform that offers a mobile app in addition to a desktop client.
RingCentral offers all of this along with additional features. Watch the video to find out more.
