Zoom breakout rooms might not be the most exciting feature on Zoom's platform, but they're definitely useful. In the age of hybrid work, breakout rooms offer companies an excellent opportunity to organize and enhance larger meetings.
With Zoom, you can split all the members of your Zoom Meeting into up to 100 separate sessions, allowing for focused discussions, brainstorming, and collaboration between employees.
Everyone can work seamlessly in smaller groups, and hosts can pull their staff back into the collective session whenever they like. Plus, breakout room participants still get access to all of Zoom's essential features, from video and audio conferencing to chat, whiteboarding, and screen sharing.
Depending on your plan, each user will even be able to access Zoom's AI assistant to help them optimize their breakout sessions.
So, how do you use, configure, and manage breakout rooms in Zoom? Here's your step-by-step guide to getting started.
What are Zoom Breakout Rooms?
Zoom breakout rooms, just like the breakout rooms available on platforms like Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex, allow the hosts of Zoom meetings to create separate groups within a larger conference, event, or training session. Zoom supports up to 100 breakout sessions per meeting and allows users to choose exactly how they want to split up the participants in each conference.
Zoom breakout rooms are included on every Zoom Workplace plan and subscription with access to Zoom Meetings. They include access to:
- Messaging: Users can communicate via chat, video, and audio in a breakout room and share files and screens. Hosts can also broadcast messages to every breakout room at once.
- Delegation options: Zoom meeting hosts can assign co-host statuses to employees during a meeting and give different team members various privileges for breakout sessions.
- Notifications: Breakout participants can click the "Ask for Help" icon at any time in a session to invite the host to join a meeting for assistance.
- Security: End-to-end encryption for Zoom Meetings is included within all breakout rooms, and each room gets its own unique meeting encryption key.
- Insights: In the "participant" tab, hosts can see who is in each breakout session and what they're doing, such as whether they're sharing their screen, streaming video, or speaking.
How to Enable Zoom Breakout Rooms: The First Step
Breakout rooms are a core feature on every Zoom plan, with access to Zoom Meetings. However, the functionality you can access within breakout rooms varies depending on your plan. For instance, you can only create up to 100 breakout rooms with the Zoom Large Meeting add-on.
Additionally, users can only access the Zoom AI companion during breakout room meetings if they have access to a paid Workplace license with the AI companion included.
Before using breakout rooms in Zoom, you may need to enable the feature. To do this on an account-based level (for all the members of your team), you'll need to:
- Sign into the Zoom web portal with an administrator account.
- Click Account Management in the navigation menu, followed by Account Settings.
- Click the Meeting tab and the Breakout room toggle under Meeting (Advanced) to enable the feature.
If you want to enable Zoom breakout rooms for specific groups, you'll need to sign in (again as an administrator) and click User Management followed by Groups in the navigation menu. Select the applicable group from the list that appears, then select the Meeting tab. Toggle the Breakout Room option on, and c "enable" to validate the change.
For individual users, all you need to do is sign into the Zoom web portal and then follow the steps outlined above to enable breakout rooms for yourself.
Options for Zoom Breakout Rooms
Whether you're enabling breakout rooms for yourself, a group, or your entire team, you'll be able to select specific "options" during the setup process. Options include:
- Enabling hosts to assign participants to specific breakout rooms when scheduling a meeting.
- Allowing hosts to broadcast text-based messages to all breakout room participants.
- Enabling host voice broadcasts for all meeting breakout rooms.
- Allowing hosts to create, delete, rename, and change breakout rooms during use.
- Enabling hosts to view activity status of participants in sessions.
As an administrator, you can also click the "lock" icon to prevent other users in your company or group from changing these settings.
How to Create Breakout Rooms in Zoom
Once breakout rooms are enabled on Zoom, users can schedule them in advance or access them during a meeting. If the option is enabled, meeting hosts can pre-arrange meeting participants into rooms when scheduling the meeting. Hosts can pre-assign up to 1000 participants and 100 rooms.
To pre-assign users to breakout rooms, sign into the Zoom web portal, then:
- Click Meetings in the navigation settings, followed by Schedule a Meeting.
- In the Options tab, select Breakout Room Pre-Assign, then Create Rooms.
- Click the + button to add new rooms to a setting.
- Once you have your rooms select Add participants and search for employees with their email address or name.
You can save breakout room assignments for later use if you're hosting recurring meetings. There's also a handy option on Zoom to create breakout rooms based on the results of a poll.
Remember that only co-hosts and hosts can assign participants to breakout rooms. While you can allow users to choose their own room, this feature can only be enabled during a meeting.
Additionally, the number of participants you can assign to a breakout room will depend on your number of rooms. For instance:
- 100 rooms: Up to 1000 participants (only with the Large Meeting Add-on)
- 50 rooms: Up to 200 participants
- 30 rooms: Up to 400 participants
- 20 rooms: Up to 500 participants
How to Create Breakout Rooms During Zoom Meetings
To create breakout rooms during a Zoom meeting, simply start an instant or scheduled meeting with Zoom, and click on the Breakout Rooms icon, it's a square split into four sections. Next, select the number of breakout rooms you want to create and how you want to assign participants to each room.
You can choose from:
- Automatic assign: Allow Zoom to split your meeting participants up evenly.
- Include co-hosts in assigning: Allow co-hosts to alter breakout room assignments.
- Let participants choose: Give participants the option to select which rooms to enter.
- Load pre-assigned rooms: Load previous room assignments on Zoom.
Next, click "Create," and Zoom will build your breakout rooms, but they won't start automatically. This gives you a chance to configure your breakout room options, such as:
- Allowing users to choose rooms: Giving participants the freedom to select the room they want to participate in.
- Allowing Main session access: Allow participants to move back to the main room whenever they want. If this is disabled, the host or co-host must end the breakout rooms first.
- Move participants automatically: Automatically move all participants into their assigned breakout rooms when the rooms launch. You can also transfer all selected participants in a breakout room back into a meeting room when the breakout room closes.
- Auto closing breakout rooms: Automatically end the breakout room after a defined number of minutes. You can also receive a notification when the time is up.
- Setting countdown timers: Show participants how much time they have left in a breakout room before they'll be returned to the main room.
Once you've configured your settings, click "Open All Rooms" to launch the session.
How to Use Breakout Rooms in Zoom: Preparation
Preparing Zoom breakout rooms for action is straightforward enough. By default, hosts and co-hosts are the only users allowed to assign participants to rooms. However, you can enable participants to give themselves to the rooms they want to use.
