Hybrid meetings

By now I have been in too many badly run hybrid meetings. Over prepare for hybrid meetings otherwise people joining remotely have a bad experience.

There's no single way to run one but the key thing that I have learnt is that people tend to under prepare for the hybrid nature of the meetings even when they are intentionally trying to accommodate for it.

The key to getting it right is setting aside some time to consider the event as a whole rather than an individual session as often hybrid meetings are a series of meetings or a day of meetings.

Here's what tends to happen and what we need to compensate for:

• People joining remotely will disengage easily if there are technical issues
• People joining remotely will tend to feel like the outsider
• People joining remotely will not be as able to adapt to on-the-fly agenda changes as easily as in-person participants
• People joining remotely will tend to retain less from the session if they experience issues
• People that are in-person will try to engage people joining remotely but won't do everything that is needed to make them feel accommodated (unless the session has planned to accommodate them fully)
• Voices in-person will tend to be amplified over voices of those who are remote

Things to consider:

How can I include and amplify the voices of the remote participants? How can I engage remote participants better?

• Give remote participants first refusal on answering any question (particularly handy for recurring meetings)
• Publish a detailed agenda beforehand which signposts remote participants all in one place.
• Stick to your agenda and announce any delays and returning times on the video call chat
• Don't run sessions where the remote participants are 'flies on the wall' - i.e. listening in but not engaging. Chances are that you will end up not accommodating them (by not providing clear audio / visual display and cues) and that you will lose their interest.
• Don't run multiple sessions in one physical space - the audio will be worse than you think on the call. Break out into different calls and physical spaces - plan ahead for doing this.
• Make sure that everyone can easily ask a question and that there will be someone to respond to it.
• Filter meeting formats by what works best in a hybrid setting.

How can I avoid technical issues?

• Plan this extensively. Have backup sessions that make sense for remote participants if some tech fails. Often the main room microphone and video is not tested and will then inevitably fail you on the day!
• Think remote-first. If you have to degrade the experience to accommodate this, degrade the in-person experience. For example, make every person in-person bring a laptop and put their camera on.
• Have a person dedicated to making sure the meeting(s) is a smooth experience in addition to any facilitator on the day.

Having a hybrid meeting set up adequately should be a basic expectation nowadays. Even if a meeting is all in-person there should be a back up plan to run it hybrid as inevitably 1 or 2 people might end up joining remotely. Before Covid, people may just not have attended but now, given how well set up we are for interacting remotely, our expectations have changed on people's attendance - we think: you'll attend where you can and physical distance isn't a limiting factor. We should be catering for this - we shouldn't expect people to come to a badly run meeting just because it is hybrid.