The contrast on the screen could not have been more distinct.
In one Zoom box: Jay Hyett, who was bundled up appropriately, given the especially bitter day in Melbourne. In the other box: his coworker, who was basking in tropical sunshine on a beach in Thailand. Although Jay, a senior delivery coach for Envato, had perhaps a sprinkling of jealousy given his colleague's locale, he actually appreciated seeing the change of scenery: “It brings me joy as well. It does get me thinking that maybe my next holiday will be in Thailand.”
What makes the Melbourne/Thailand scene truly unusual is that it is a snapshot from 2017 – pre‐COVID‐19, pre‐pandemic, pre‐work‐from‐home as a global norm. In other words, well before the world went suddenly virtual.
But this could be a snapshot of a virtual meeting on any given day at Envato, before, during, and certainly after the pandemic. Envato, an online marketplace where creatives can sell their digital assets, isn't a purely remote company. It has offices in Australia, the United States, and Mexico, but its founders built the company with a flexible workforce in mind. Personally, they prioritized the opportunity to travel, so they set up a policy that allows employees to work from anywhere for up to three months as long as the employee has a plan that is approved by the team. The Melbourne/Thailand scenario merely exemplified the “work from anywhere” ethos that has been ingrained into the company DNA.
Envato has been hybrid from the start and by all accounts it has worked quite well. Perhaps that's why it's been named one of the best places to work in Australia more than six times by the Great Places to Work Benchmark study (Scott 2019). That's not surprising when you consider occupational psychology research. Flexible work situations tend to motivate employees to be more committed to their organization, be more satisfied with their work, and enjoy a level of work–life balance that is uncommon among people who work the traditional 9‐to‐5 schedule (Allen, Johnson, Kiburz, and Shockley 2013).
With some surveys indicating that 9 out of 10 businesses are adopting a hybrid model, the success story of Envato will surely be heartening (Alexander et al. 2021). Hybrid work and hybrid meetings are uncharted territory for the vast majority of organizations. Many may feel like they are still recovering from their abrupt move to fully remote and want to avoid learning a whole new way of meeting. However, the trends toward flexible work can't be denied, and when done well, hybrid meetings get higher marks than every other meeting modality.
In this chapter, we will explore:
In order to define what we mean by “hybrid work,” we must begin by understanding the nature of work in general. After all, the range of jobs people do entails various levels of interaction between workers as well as the different kinds of outcomes expected, like the number of widgets produced or words typed. Some workers are knowledge workers, much of whose time is spent on a computer, which may conjure up images of an employee confined to the cubicle, pecking away at a keyboard. Some workers labor with their hands, with little interaction with computers or even meetings – a materials handler in a factory, for example. Let's begin our conversation with what work is, how independent or interdependent it is, and how physical or virtual it is.
When people think of work, they often think of job tasks – what a person does, like typing a report or washing dishes. Some job tasks are independent. They don't require anyone else to provide information, instructions, guidance, ideas, or input. For example, a small farmer does not need anyone to assist them in planting their field. They gather their resources and plant the field. Now someone might say, “Well, who does the farmer get the resources, the seeds, and the fuel for the tractor from? Doesn't that mean they're dependent on others?” To be fair, it's hard to think of any job task that is not connected in some way to others. However, if the task can be done independent of others, then it's an individual noncollaborative task (i.e. it can be and often is better completed alone). If the task requires others’ involvement, it's interdependent, so collaboration of some kind is needed. You can probably think of more examples of interdependent work than fully independent work.
Another significant differentiator for work is whether it's virtual or physical (Robey, Schwaig, and Jin 2003). “Virtual work” is work that occurs in an online space. It may simulate or mirror physical work but it doesn't have to. For example, virtual work includes most knowledge work jobs, where someone works at a computer doing any number of tasks, like writing reports, running statistics, answering email, and so on. “Physical work” is work that requires engaging in tasks in the physical world and the deliverable is a tangible thing. For example, building cars, cutting lumber, or farming a field is physical work, not virtual work.
“Hybrid work” is generally synonymous with flexible work with a bit more specificity, and has components of both physical and virtual work. Hybrid work acknowledges the need for some standard in‐office colocated work that is paired with the ability to work from home or anywhere else as needed. That means that all those benefits attributed to flexible work schedules generally apply to hybrid work, too. As soon as one person or team in an organization embraces hybrid work schedules, virtual and hybrid meetings become necessary – for them as well as for others who interact with them. And just as hybrid work has the potential to maintain productivity and improve well‐being, hybrid meetings also hold that promise.
As basic as this may seem, let's start with a definition of a meeting. A meeting is two or more people coming together to discuss a matter (Schwartzman 1986). It's usually more formal than a chat but less formal than a lecture. You are all probably painfully aware of what a meeting is, right? But there are different ways to do meetings. Historically, the fan favorite was the fully face‐to‐face meeting where everyone is in the same room. Then, there's the meeting de rigueur of 2020, the virtual meeting where everyone is logged in remotely. This one can have a couple of formats. Some virtual meetings include everyone on camera, everyone on audio, or some combination of the two. The latter is probably the most common because some people might not be “camera ready,” whether it's due to a perceived “bad hair day” or a location that does not reflect the professionalism the meeting deserves. (Placing your laptop on the tile floor of the bathroom is not good video etiquette.)
So, what is a hybrid meeting? It's a meeting where some people are in the same room and some are linked in remotely (Saatçi, Rädle, Rintel, O'Hara, and Klokmose 2019). The result is that some people are face‐to‐face while others are connected via telephone, videoconference, or both.
Think about that a bit. What does this mean? Essentially it means that instead of one communication medium or network, we have the potential for multiple ones. In a face‐to‐face meeting, you have one network of people all using the same communication medium – the air that they collectively share in the room. In a purely virtual meeting, you have one network of people all represented on the screen using the same medium – the internet connection that conveys their audio and video. In a hybrid meeting, you can have multiple networks, all with different communication mediums.
This means that a hybrid meeting is much more complex in terms of how people are connected. Face‐to‐face, everyone's together. Virtual, everyone can join via videoconference or teleconference. Everyone is on the same wavelength, or at least communicating through roughly the same medium. Hybrid messes with that. For example, you could have three people together in a room, two dialed in on the conference line, and two more in their little video box on the videoconference screen. Or, perhaps you have two or three groups in different rooms all linked together through a videoconferencing platform. Regardless, now the environment includes paying attention to the people you're physically with, the people on the phone, and the people on camera. Accordingly, the cognitive load for these meetings can quickly become immense.
While hybrid meetings are a bit different and more complicated, they are not new (Reed and Allen 2021). They happened prior to 2020, but were pretty infrequent. In fact, our data from 2019 indicated that only 13% of meetings were hybrid. However, hybrid meetings are now on the rise and that means the need to master them is on the rise as well.
Much of what it takes to have a successful hybrid meeting parallels the elements of a successful virtual meeting. If you haven't quite mastered the virtual meeting, take heart. We will be revisiting many of the best practices throughout the book, as outlined in our previous book Suddenly Virtual: Making Remote Meetings Work.
But let's start with one important concept from our fully remote model that applies to hybrid as well: virtual meetings require more intentional participation and facilitation. For example, in virtual meetings, if two people talk at the same time, most people cannot understand either of them. That's partly a function of the technology, which limits concurrent audio tracks, and partly a result of a human's inability to comprehend two streams of information at the same time (Adams 2019). Therefore, the advice we give everyone in a virtual meeting is to foster a participative environment where turn‐taking is established as a norm, and people are encouraged to use and reference the chat liberally during the flow of the conversation to ensure that ideas are not lost. In hybrid meetings, this emphasis on facilitated participation needs to remain and perhaps be emphasized even more. A free flow of communication can be hard in a hybrid meeting, especially if everyone is left to their own devices to determine when they want to talk. In fact, the communication challenges have prompted many facilitation and meeting experts to balk at even trying hybrid meetings. However, this would be a missed opportunity and one that is out of sync with the realities of our flexible world of work.
Lisette Sutherland is one of the top thought leaders in the remote workspace as the director of Collaboration Superpowers, a consulting and training firm, based in the Netherlands. As such, it might be a little disconcerting to hear her say, “Hybrid is so painful inherently. In fact, when we used to teach the remote meetings master class, we would always say, avoid hybrid whenever possible.” But even she acknowledges reality with a quick follow‐up: “Now we are kind of changing our tune because it is clearly the way of the future.”
Before we (Joe and Karin) dove into writing this book, we had an email exchange about this very issue. Is a hybrid meeting even worth the effort? Should we advocate simply sticking with virtual meetings, which we have at least gotten used to?
In that email Joe brought up three factors that may be holding us back from unlocking the potential of hybrid meetings, potential that the data supports and that we will share in Chapter 2. For now, we will take a look at what is influencing some of the pushback on hybrid meetings: Joe's initial thoughts coupled with some embellishments based upon our current thinking enlightened by our research for this book.
First, as Lisette indicated, the recommendation for meetings to all be on video rather than hybrid has been a common refrain for some time. It was the standard suggestion from meeting consultants, because, frankly, hybrid is hard. It requires both leaders and attendees to deploy a slightly different set of skills within the meeting setting. Consultants sort of decided, at least temporarily, that rather than try to teach them how to make hybrid meetings work, they would suggest face‐to‐face or all virtual. But choosing the easiest path does not guarantee the best outcome. We argue that the effort you invest in running effective hybrid meetings is not only worth it but is acknowledging that the landscape has changed. People can learn new things … and fast. Heck, the pandemic certainly taught us that. But learning new things doesn't come without effort.
Early on, the data suggested that fully virtual meetings did create a level playing field as the norms of interpersonal interaction (e.g. who speaks first, who leads, and who sits in the corner) had not immediately migrated online. However, in recent months we have seen articles about women and minorities feeling marginalized online (e.g. Hansen 2021). The hierarchies and biases based on gender and race are starting to creep into virtual meetings. So, making meetings a level playing field takes more than changing their modality. To assume issues of diversity and inclusion are not problematic when virtual is to assume wrong. In a workplace that has been awakened to diversity, equity, and inclusion, virtual meetings are not a panacea.
Our pandemic pods were designed to create a personal safe space, and that prolonged cocooning had some lasting impacts. The angst over gathering is partly a function of “return‐to‐normal anxiety” (Chatterjee 2021). People can be afraid to gather in groups or get anxious when in groups. If this fear or anxiety creates unhealthy isolation, clinicians may even diagnose a person with context‐specific agoraphobia (i.e. fear of places that incite panic attacks, such as large groups of people). Organizations and the teams within them are likely cognizant of that and want to avoid making anyone feel uncomfortable or even possibly triggering a panic attack. One avoidance tactic is to suggest sticking with virtual meetings for a while and then slowly transitioning to in‐person.
In this regard, hybrid meetings can help. They allow people the flexibility they need to work where they are most comfortable, whether that is virtual or in‐person. After‐all, “return‐to‐normal anxiety” is just one of many reasons a person might need to work from home for a time but still need to interact effectively with those who are in the office.
There is one overarching reason for embracing hybrid, and it has roots in evolutionary theory. As much as Joe would like to do a deep dive into the work of Darwin and others, allow us to be direct. It is a known fact that humans like to be together and that if they ceased to be together, humanity would end. It's as simple as that. If you'd like a specific example, look no further than the penal system. There's a reason solitary confinement is the harshest form of incarceration. It's terribly difficult for humans to be alone.
While some poorly executed meetings might feel like you've been sentenced to attend them, most of them do have one redeeming quality: people like to be in the same room with others. It doesn't matter whether they are introverted or extroverted. They still want to be in the presence of others. And when they cannot be in the same room with others, for whatever reason, they want a way to feel connected by actually being connected, and technology allows us to do that now better than ever before. In fact, think about all the times you or others came to the office with a sniffle because you needed to be at a meeting. Now, you can comfortably keep your cold cooties out of the office by staying at home but still be present and a part of the in‐office activities.
Hybrid meetings offer that opportunity, and make no mistake, they are an opportunity. Hybrid meetings are the “meeting of the future” and the future is now. In fact, it probably started a while ago, and you may be thinking, “I missed the boat.” Don't worry! That's what this book is for. It provides answers to how to make these very complicated meeting environments work. Hybrid meetings are complex but not impossible. Read on.
The anxiety about navigating hybrid meetings at every level of the enterprise across all verticals is understandable and practically universal for those who are entering uncharted organizational waters. We all just survived a colossal paradigm change in the way we meet, from face‐to‐face to virtual. Now we are expected to tackle another one? In short, the answer is “yes” because the vast majority of workers are asking for it and have demonstrated a “fight or flight” resolve.
Take the case of Catherine Merrill, the CEO and owner of Washingtonian Media. She made headlines herself after her essay touting the merits of working in the office was published. She even raised the possibility of turning those who chose to stay remote into independent contractors without benefits. The employee response? A work stoppage and a tweet:
As members of the Washingtonian editorial staff, we want our CEO to understand the risks of not valuing our labor. We are dismayed by Cathy Merrill's public threat to our livelihoods. We will not be publishing today. (Flynn 2021)
Shortly thereafter, the staff was asked to form a committee to offer suggestions to management on a post‐pandemic plan for the workforce. That was a very public “fight” response.
The “flight” response continues to play out across all industries as workers choose to walk rather than wait for their employers to be enlightened about the merits of flexible work. When push comes to shove, employees are choosing to quit and find a different job that offers them the hybrid or remote arrangement they desire, and they're even willing to take a pay cut to secure it (Melin and Egkolfopoulou 2021).
That's why even the experts who called hybrid meetings “inherently painful” know that the shift to hybrid is likely unavoidable. Flexible work is priority one and one of the key drivers for the move to hybrid meetings.
The pandemic, for all of its horrors, did create an awakening of a sort. At first, the massive move to remote work was driven by a desire to be safe. Staying at home meant saving lives – of our families, our friends, our coworkers. As vaccination efforts ramped up and the pandemic's global grip began to loosen, the drivers of what work would look like started to shift. “Safety” started being replaced by words like “flexibility” for employees and “cost savings” for companies that were shocked by the meager line item that used to be the bloated travel budget.
Make no mistake, the publisher of the Washingtonian was not alone in pining for the days when everyone was back in the confines of the brick‐and‐mortar building. Many managers believed that employees were more productive in the office than elsewhere. They viewed flexible work arrangements with skepticism – how would they know someone was working if they couldn't see them? But the financial proof points were made by the pandemic and the productivity metrics were indisputable. According to a study quoted by Bloomberg, work‐from‐home lifted productivity in the U.S. economy by 5% (Curran 2021).
To meeting scientists, this came as no surprise. After more than 40 years of research on the topic of flexible work arrangements, the evidence is clear. People who are given flexible work arrangements are just as, if not more, productive than those in the office (Baltes, Briggs, Huff, Wright, and Neuman 1999; Hayman 2010). So, to those managers who are worried about work from home continuing, you needn't worry. In fact, further evidence suggests that flexible work schedules are also better for employees’ overall well‐being (Hayman 2010). The bottom line is that employees are as or more productive and they are healthier. (And with that, another potential cost savings – insurance premiums.)
For these reasons and more, the future of work is flexible and those who think otherwise will have a hard time making the case against it. “You can't go back and say it's not possible because clearly it was possible,” says Lisette Sutherland, who has been evangelizing the merits of remote work and living it for nearly two decades as a German‐born American living in the Netherlands and working remotely. “The flexibility and freedom are just too valuable. And now that they've had a taste … there's no way everyone is going to go back to the office full‐time. I just can't see it.”
Every survey conducted so far agrees. Microsoft's 2021 Work Trend Index found that 70% of workers want flexible remote work options. A significantly smaller proportion prefer either all remote or all in the office (Microsoft 2021). In other words, a one‐size‐fits‐all approach is not the way to go. Organizations will need to strike the right balance between flexibility and bringing people together for their interdependent work activities.
One visible trend that indicates that companies are rethinking the need and desire to have everyone work in‐person is that many have chosen to shrink their physical footprints and even to move their headquarters elsewhere. Not surprisingly, tech companies, often in the vanguard of work innovation, were some of the first to announce major changes to their corporate addresses. Snowflake, a cloud data analytics vendor, made quite a splash by shifting their corporate headquarters from San Mateo, California, to “No‐Headquarters/Bozeman, Montana.” In fact, the state of California saw a significant exodus of companies that then popped up in places like Colorado, Texas, and South Florida (Levy 2021). And many workers who were tired of paying astronomical rents and enduring relentless commutes were happy to follow, seeking a better quality of life at a much lower cost. The supply of homes, especially in suburbia, couldn't keep up with demand – an outcome of companies reducing office space and employees wanting more space. Remember Jay Hyett, the Melbourne‐based senior delivery coach from our Part One introduction? At that time, he worked for Envato, an Australian company designed to be hybrid from the start. Jay is now working at Culture Amp, yet another highly distributed workforce with offices in San Francisco, New York, and London, but there are pockets of Culture Amp employees all around the world. As someone who valued his previous hybrid gig, Jay knew he'd feel right at home: “It's created this level playing field. It doesn't matter where you are. We are all there to get work done.”
Work isn't where you go, it's what you do. Virtual meetings and now hybrid meetings are how we can coordinate the work, wherever we are.
While the changes in location are certainly dramatic, they are not to be outdone by the significant shift in perceptions about those who choose to work from home. Did you have any coworkers who were remote prior to the pandemic? Chances are you might have fantasized about their daily work life. You were sure it involved maybe a few hours banging out a report or answering a couple of emails but was largely spent luxuriating over the morning paper with a cup of joe while deciding what sweatpants to pull on that day … or whether to just stick with the pajamas. Who would know?
In fact, in a study from just before the pandemic, Tahrima Ferdous and colleagues (Ferdous, Ali, and French 2020) investigated whether the stigma associated with flexible work schedules impacted workers and in what way. That's right, “stigma.” Using a sample of workers from Australia, their study showed that workers with a flexible work schedule felt stigmatized by their colleagues who were on a standard schedule and worked in the office. In fact, this stigma was related to lower well‐being, thoughts of leaving the organization, and general reduction in the use of their flexible work arrangement. The old jokes (pre‐2020) about “Yeah, Dave is just sitting at home in his sweatpants while we're here working” actually did hurt.
Additionally, this stigma had some very tangible manifestations, one of which could be described as the “promotion penalty.” The promotion penalty refers to the fact that those who were in the office and had more face time experienced more opportunities to be assigned tasks that better prepared and positioned them for promotions. In a 2014 Stanford study of a large multinational based in China, work‐from‐home employees had a 50% lower rate of promotion within two years compared to their colleagues who worked in the office (Bloom, Liang, Roberts, and Ying 2015). In short, remote workers were often stigmatized as not “really working” because they didn't have the face time to prove that they were. Often, they were treated as second‐class citizens by their coworkers and even their bosses, which led them to be overlooked and even undervalued. This contributed to a very slow adoption of flexible work arrangements in general, at least until March 2020.
The pandemic changed all that when everyone was abruptly placed in the very situation that they traditionally maligned … and found that the fantasy was just that. Remote work was indeed work, and, in reality, was much more challenging in many ways than being in the office, particularly since there was no delineated start and end to the day, which had an effect on work–life balance (which we'll address in Chapter 3).
Anecdotally, we were hearing about how the stigma attached to remote workers had faded away during the pandemic, but data from an early 2021 survey by the World Economic Forum of 5,000 workers in the UK confirmed it (Taneja, Mizen, and Bloom 2021). When asked “How have your perceptions about working from home changed?,” more than three out of four respondents indicated that their perceptions had improved, with over half saying that their perceptions about working from home had either substantially or hugely improved (Taneja, Mizen, and Bloom 2021).
Prior to the pandemic, the associated remote work stigma kept many people from even considering it. The desire and the willingness to work from home, even for part of the time, would likely have been largely absent without this forced “learn by doing” exercise. By having no choice but to work remotely during the pandemic, most people discovered that remote work was actually better than expected, and attitudes adjusted accordingly. In fact, that same World Economic Forum survey found that 70% of respondents would embrace working from home two to three days a week even after the COVID‐19 crisis passes.
While the pandemic did open our eyes to new ways of working, how lasting the impact will be is unknown. As the reshuffling and transitioning continues, the stigmatization of remote work may creep back in. Will people be judged by the number of days they choose to be in the office? (“Oh, you're only coming in one day a week? I don't feel comfortable unless I'm in the office at least four days.”) The metrics by which we measure performance will likely evolve as well, but will face time no longer be part of the equation? Will we see promotion penalties arise again?
Lisette Sutherland echoes that concern for those who opt to stay solely remote. “My biggest concern is that the remote people will totally get left behind. Connecting over a big plate of nachos and drinks with your coworkers … there's just no replacement for that online. You can connect through video. You can be a robot with telepresence, but you still won't be able to share that plate of nachos with your colleagues. You're simply at a disadvantage.”
Who may be most often subject to the potential return of the stigma of remote work could be directly related to gender. In a survey by the Harvard Business Review, 30,000 men and women with young children were asked how often they would like to work from home after COVID‐19. While nearly two‐thirds of all respondents expressed a desire to work at least one day a week from home, women with young children wanted to work from home full‐time almost 50% more than did fathers with young children (Bloom 2021).
Part of the motivation for women to want to work from home full‐time is that childcare duties fall upon them more than they do for men. The research confirms that couples with small children do not equally share the responsibilities for caring for the children (Cohut 2017). In their free time, mothers tend to focus more on child‐rearing and household duties while fathers engage in more leisure activities and hobbies. The fact that this is an unfair situation does not change the fact that for the majority of women, this is their reality. So, when asked if they want to work from home so they can more easily do their second job, the answer is more likely to be “sign me up” than it is for men.
That's why Nicholas Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University and one of the lead researchers for the survey, is voicing concern: “Single young men could all choose to come into the office five days a week and rocket up the firm, while employees with young children, particularly women, who choose to WFH [work from home] for several days each week are held back. This would be both a diversity loss and legal time bomb for companies” (Bloom 2021).
As organizations and team leaders plot out their hybrid path, Bloom suggests not allowing individuals to dictate how often they're in the office but instead have managers choose what days their team should work from home. That way, face time is equal across the team, and no one can feel like they will receive brownie points for putting in an extra day or two in the office.
Even with guardrails put up around potential inequities, organizations that are going all‐in on hybrid work should monitor for any early warning signs that one group is being marginalized by the choices they have made on where they will work and when.
Hybrid meetings bring a level of complexity to the meeting environment that few have experienced before, but hybrid meetings can work well when done right. Leaning into learning how to conduct effective hybrid meetings echoes the call for greater flexibility from a workforce enlightened by the possibility of working remote while also acknowledging the human desire for in‐person connection. Still not convinced? Let's look at the data next: it may surprise you.