9 tips and tools for effectively managing your hybrid meetings
When hybrid conference calls go sideways, they’re like bad meetings on steroids. Improperly managed, they’re not only chaotic, they also impede organizational decision-making. Remote workers feel this frustration most acutely. They’re at a disadvantage vying with onsite participants to contribute and influence meeting outcomes. Onsite participants simply ignore or undervalue remote participants—often because they can’t see them.
Facing these hybrid headwinds, remote workers become passive participants in group innovation or brainstorming exercises. How can teams successfully achieve hybrid work nirvana then?
At my company, aside from more general connectivity issues, we’ve observed that hybrid conference calls can fail in less tangible ways, such as when meetings are run using their former in-person formats. The problems that impinge hybrid workplace meetings aren’t solved simply because you can “see” every participant.
Just as a concert experienced in person affects fans differently than one watched on TV, a hybrid workplace meeting today can be less engaging or productive for participants than one conducted entirely in person. We believe that hybrid meetings don’t foster great decision-making—at least not without thoughtful prework and follow-up work.
The Wall Street Journal reported that large organizations such as Adobe, Apple, Salesforce, and Allstate among others, intend to make hybrid work a long-term practice. That places even more stress on the importance of getting hybrid meetings right.
How hybrid meetings should work
What does it look like when hybrid meetings are planned and executed more productively and appropriately? I asked our usability experts at my conferencing software company to study this question.
In today’s hybrid workplace, with workers in multiple time zones and only some onsite at company headquarters, decision-making isn’t bound by scheduled video conference calls. But in many, if not most, organizations, looping in off-site workers is basically hit-and-miss. Actual business decisions are often made by phone or in different message threads. While that’s simply going to happen sometimes, what matters is sharing new ideas or current thinking with the entire team.
Here are nine ways to improve your organization’s hybrid meetings:
Finding a productive balance in the hybrid world
The hybrid workplace is proving its value. A remarkable 83% of global workers surveyed by Accenture call it “optimal.” But, if leaders and workers fail to adjust their behavior to optimize a hybrid workplace meeting model, organizations will become inefficient, remote workers will languish, and morale—or even innovation—may nosedive.
Before the pandemic, many people thought about meetings strictly in terms of business productivity. Were we making decisions that advanced our business objectives? It’s still a worthy question, but today, we take a more nuanced view. Productivity in a hybrid workplace is about fostering healthy and engaged workers, leading to smarter business decisions, not just seeing how much stuff we can discuss by the end of the call.
Keep in mind the meeting itself is not the desired outcome. A team meeting remains what it’s always been: merely a means to an end. Hybrid meetings need to be planned and executed more thoughtfully and appropriately. What the world needs now isn’t more meetings, it’s smartly planned or better-managed ones.
Michael Peachey is a VP of user experience at RingCentral.
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