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Handling Hybrid Meetings, Part 1

Excerpt from Lead Conversations that Count: How Busy Managers Run Great Meetings
(Rowntree Press, 2021)

The learning COVID-19 has thrown at us will continue long after we find a way to prevent its spread and health risks. Before the pandemic, opportunities for employees to work remotely were more the exception than the rule. We have adapted quickly to working from home to comply with prescribed public health measures to contain the spread of the virus.

The current challenge facing busy managers is how to effectively lead hybrid meetings, conversations or gatherings where some attendees are co-located in the same physical space while others participate using conferencing technology.

The pandemic has fundamentally shifted how and where we work together. Some businesses such as Shopify, Atlassian, Facebook and Dropbox, have decided that employees can work from home permanently. Others are designing options for employees to work a specified number of days from home per week or per month, with policies that will necessitate hybrid meetings. As economies around the world begin to emerge from Covid restrictions, a survey by McKinsey suggests that 90% of organizations will adopt some combination of remote and on-site work.

A survey of global executives conducted by MIT Sloan indicates that COVID-19 has driven a permanent shift in how we work with respondents expecting to continue to work virtually at least 50 percent of the time beyond the pandemic. Further, the survey notes an acceleration of a pre-COVID-19 shift in how individuals and teams do intellectual work. Routine tasks involving coordination and transactions can be effectively carried out in virtual meetings, but work requiring a deeper level of team collaboration, such as collective learning, innovation, or building a shared culture, is better accomplished face-to-face. The authors conclude that “the post-pandemic future of teamwork will be a purposefully hybrid combination of virtual coordination and in- person collaboration.”

I’ve heard plenty of stories of how these are working (or not!). Here are a few examples:

• You kick off your next virtual meeting, only to discover that two participants have decided at the last minute to meet up in a co-working space – but without headphones. Instead of starting strongly with meaningful connection and clarity about the purpose of the meeting, you spend the first ten minutes troubleshooting audio feedback. It leaves all participants frustrated and feeling like their time is not respected.
• You’re so relieved that meetings are returning to normal that you focus mainly on the attendees physically in the room. Your virtual attendees feel like ignored bystanders, as their chat comments or raised hands aren’t consistently or effectively incorporated into the discussion.
• You have been leading a monthly meeting remotely, but now five group members are joining in from the office boardroom, while the rest continue to connect via videoconference. You find it much harder to read the room because it’s difficult to see those five people in one small Zoom square.
• You notice far more sidebar conversations happening with the people who are physically in the same room. It creates a distraction for the virtual participants because they can’t hear what’s being said and feel left out of the loop.
• A recent example I heard was where a hybrid meeting started at a certain time, but the first 20 minutes were dedicated to in-person participants having a chance to grab a coffee and mill about with each other, while the virtual attendees were left with no designed interactions for them. So they showed up on time, and had to twiddle their thumbs while the in-person folks had some social time!

Hybrid meetings take the connection challenge up a notch because the playing field for participant engagement is no longer level.

The future workplace will undoubtedly require continued agility and responsiveness in how work is done. Just as nobody had a playbook for running an organization through a global pandemic, there is no clear checklist for working together post-pandemic. However, the roadmap to the next “new normal” will best be developed through dialogue and consultation with all parts of the organization.

Shifting out of a predominantly virtual and work-from-home paradigm offers an opportunity to build upon the lessons learned and intentionally leave behind practices and processes that no longer serve the purpose of our meetings and gatherings.

Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters, urges organizations to take advantage of this unique moment in time as we collectively emerge from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a podcast interview with Brené Brown, Parker said, “Return is an opportunity to hit the reset button. Let’s not rush back to formats that weren’t working for us before. Pause and ask, “How do we want to do this now?” We need to have conversations about this.” I couldn’t agree more.

In Part 2 of “Handling Hybrid Meetings”, I’ll share with you some strategies and principles to help take your hybrid meetings up a notch!

Take Action

Whether you’ve led a hybrid meeting or participated in one, do some reflection on your experience in them. What worked well? What felt like a challenge or where did things go off the rails? What would you do differently in your next hybrid session?

Resources

Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters (Riverhead Books, 2020)

Carolyn Ellis, Lead Conversations that Count: How Busy Managers Run Great Meetings, (Rowntree Press, 2021).

Bob Frisch and Cary Green, “What It Takes to Run a Great Hybrid Meeting,” (Harvard Business Review, June 3, 2021)

Author Information: This is an excerpt from Lead Conversations that Count: How Busy Managers Run Great Meetings by Carolyn Ellis (Rowntree Press, 2021). For more information on the book, please visit www.LeadConversationsThatCount.com. This article may be shared provided the author information is included.