Breakout rooms are a great way to engage meeting participants with each other. You can easily assign them to one or more rooms, visit them at will, and welcome them back after a set duration.

Create Breakout Rooms

Any Zoom meeting host can create breakout rooms, as long as the feature is enabled in the account settings. Simply click Breakout Rooms on the Zoom toolbar. Then, you can manually or automatically assign participants to one or more separate rooms.

Doing so empowers attendees to respond to conversation prompts, engage in other small group activities, and engage interpersonally more easily than in a large meeting room.

Additional Room Options

During creation, the organizer may set a few useful options:

  1. Participants may self-manage their breakout room attendance or be forced to remain there. With self-management, while a breakout room is opened and assigned, a participant may come and go as they please.
  2. Zoom can show a countdown of up to two minutes before forcing each participant’s return
  3. You can set a time limit for a breakout room. Besides the countdown timer option, when the room’s time expires, participants return to the main session.

When the same people are in attendance throughout a meeting, multiple breakout room sessions can result in repeating the same small groups. However, there is an option to recreate the room assignments if desired.

Monitoring Breakout Activity

If participants are capable of self-managing their needs while in breakout rooms, they can “Ask for Help,” and the host respond by joining them. Or, from their Breakout Rooms management window, a host can join any breakout room at will and check in on their engagement.

Also, hosts can broadcast messages to all rooms to save themselves the trouble of visiting each one. Each breakout room otherwise has all the same features as the main room, including audio/video controls, chat, recording, and screen sharing.

So a host can focus on the core content of a meeting, I find it best when they delegate features like chat, audio/muting, and breakout rooms to one or more co-hosts. Co-hosts are permitted in all paid Zoom licenses and there can be an unlimited number of them.

Have you experienced breakout rooms in Zoom yet? Were you a host or a participant? What was your experience like?