While hybrid meetings are not a new concept, their popularity has grown significantly in recent years. While the advantages of hybrid meetings may have been obvious in the past, the pandemic’s spread and the overall shift toward hybrid working, co working offices, serviced offices and remote meeting spaces have pushed these meetings to the forefront of workplace communication. It’s no surprise that hybrid meetings have become so popular: they result in more cost-effective, global, and inclusive collaboration.
We’ve compiled eight best practices to help make your hybrid meetings more effective, based on our experience designing and facilitating meetings for executive teams and boards.
Improve your Audio Skills
While remote participants must be able to see who is speaking and what is going on in the meeting room, good audio is even more important. While the visual aspects of meetings receive a lot of attention, audio is frequently overlooked until the last minute. Make sure the room has enough high-quality microphones for remote participants to hear to avoid a last-minute scramble caused by poor audio. If multiple microphones aren’t an option because you’re in a hotel or other temporary meeting space, suggest supplementing your audio input by having in-person attendees pass around a hand-held microphone before talking.
Suggest a Technological Boost
The pandemic has accelerated the use and evolution of videoconferencing technology, allowing virtual meetings to be held using computers, tablets, and phones. New features are being introduced to improve face-to-face communication among in-person and remote attendees as providers invest heavily to better enable hybrid meetings.
Zoom’s Smart Gallery, for example, uses artificial intelligence to recognize individual faces in a shared room and pull them into screen panes so that remote participants can see them in the now-familiar gallery view. Microsoft is creating new meeting rooms that are tailored to the hybrid experience. You should look into what technology upgrades are available to help your team have a more immersive and authentic experience.
Consider the Remote Participant.
As you plan the meeting, keep in mind what remote participants will need to see in order to participate fully. They should be able to see the faces of in-room attendees, shared presentations, physical documents distributed, and content created on whiteboards or flipcharts during the meeting, among other things.
Increase the Size of Remote Participants
Giving remote participants more presence in the room is another way to give them equal status. Set up two additional large monitors — one on each side of the room — to show “life-size” panes of the remote participants for the duration of the meeting, in addition to the main screen in the center.
These large images, we’ve discovered, help in-person attendees accept remote colleagues as full participants and serve as a constant reminder to include them in the conversation. Similarly, if at all possible, remote participants’ voices should come from the same monitors as their faces — ceiling speakers tend to emphasize the situation’s artificiality.
Test the Tech Before the Meeting
Nothing kills the momentum of a meeting like waiting for an audio or video glitch to be fixed. Test the audio-visual setup — both in-room and for remote attendees — before an important meeting. Schedule a 10-15 minute one-on-one warm-up session to familiarize remote participants with what they’ll see and hear during the meeting, as well as any software features they’ll likely be asked to use. It’s well worth the short time investment.
Hybrid meetings will become a permanent part of how organizations operate as the pandemic eases and we resume gathering in person. At the same time as our collective Covid-driven year of meetings virtually raised expectations for remote participation, these meetings add to the complexity. We can create hybrid meetings where all participants — whether in the room or across the ocean — feel engaged, valued, and equal by leveraging technology and tools, being thoughtful in meeting design, and providing strong facilitation.
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