Knowing what to do is just as important as knowing what not to do when leading a hybrid meeting. Given the fact that this meeting format is new to the majority of organizations, the likelihood of missteps is high. In this chapter, we aim to highlight some of the typical pitfalls leaders are likely to stumble into unless they are looking for them. The hope is that by raising awareness, we can help leaders steer clear of these pitfalls or course‐correct if necessary.
Meeting effectiveness is always a moving target, however, and that's why it is valuable to frequently evaluate how your hybrid meetings measure up. We'll wrap up this chapter with a feedback template that we recommend meeting leaders adopt as either a self‐ or group reflection exercise.
In this chapter, we will explore:
If you've ever taken a tour of a museum, historic site, or new locale, you know the impact an excellent tour guide can have on your overall experience. As a meeting leader, you have the opportunity to greatly influence the impact of each session, according to Stanford lecturer in organizational behavior Matt Abrahams: “Your job when you are leading any meeting, whether it's in person, hybrid, or virtual, is to be a good tour guide. And a good tour guide is all about expectation‐setting, reviewing where you've been and where you are going so everyone stays on the same page.” Just like a bad tour guide can lead to a bad overall experience, a meeting leader who doesn't follow best practices runs the risk of creating a bad meeting experience for all. In a hybrid meeting, a format so new to so many, it's all too easy to make mistakes.
While we called this book Suddenly Hybrid, the transition to hybrid as a whole has not been all that sudden. In fact, discussion about how to make this work started months, if not a full year, prior to the actual move to this meeting modality. Business leaders, with good intention, sought to rethink their processes, implement new policies, and build up the proper infrastructure to make the return to the office on flexible terms as smooth as possible. With all these changes, though, one thing remains stubbornly the same: the gravitational pull of bad habits is strong (Graybiel and Smith 2014).
One reason for the pull toward long‐standing bad habits is all about schemas and human nature (Myers and Smith 2012). All humans develop schemas. “Schemas” are mental concepts or templates that guide human perception and interpretation of their environment (Myers and Smith 2012). In other words, they are schematics for our thinking about our world. They help us organize our thoughts and behavior into easily understood, digestible chunks, allowing for easy transition from situation to situation. Examples of schemas include social roles, stereotypes, worldviews, and cultural celebrations (Michalak 2021). Specifically, if we asked you to think about an eight‐year‐old's birthday party, you would probably have a pretty good idea of what you'd see and do at the party. For example, you might expect there to be presents, cake and ice cream, a group singing “Happy Birthday” to someone, and perhaps games and other activities. Joe's eight‐year‐old had all these things with a Harry Potter theme as well, which probably introduces a secondary schema about what one might expect to see and do at a witch‐and‐wizard‐themed birthday party. We have schemas for all sorts of activities we engage in, from sporting events to weddings, from dates to family reunions.
We even have them for meetings, including face‐to‐face, virtual, and hybrid meetings. Schemas are shortcuts for our brains and provide a lot of value in a complicated world. Having them means you can go to various events and know what to expect, know how to behave, and not really have to think deeply about it. Apply that to meetings and the schema holds on to both the good and the bad routines and rituals of meeting. In other words, the schema defines what is expected and is locked into a person's thought processing. It keeps things consistent for meeting after meeting after meeting.
The downside to schema is that when bad elements are incorporated, getting rid of those bad elements is a challenge, even with interventions, training, and reminders. If you've read Suddenly Virtual, you may remember some of the bad habits that are all too common across all meetings. Some major ones worth special mention are:
We could go on and on here, but we would direct you to the comprehensive list of counterproductive meeting behaviors that often become habits that we shared in Suddenly Virtual in Chapter 3 (see Allen, Yoerger, Lehmann‐Willenbrock, and Jones 2015). Joe also has a number of insomnia‐curing academic journal articles on the topic that you are welcome to use for your most restless nights. Note, this would be where Karin, the meeting leader, would say that Joe is being sarcastic and rolling his eyes, as he always thinks his research is truly remarkable, meaningful, and should be read by everyone. See, we are trying to follow our best practices even in book form.
The good news is that when there is a major disruption to an environment, new schemas form and old schemas get rocked. This is reason for hope that this time may be different. We all lived through COVID‐19, which sent a huge proportion of the workforce home. That collective experience may have rewired us in a way that will allow for those new good habits to stick, and perhaps some of the old bad habits to be broken permanently.
“I do think people who are coming back to the office are likely to revert back to their old habits,” says Matt Abrahams of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford, “but I do think all of us had such a powerful experience of being remote that we have a chance of people remembering what that was like.” For meeting leaders, being able to harken back to what it felt like to be remote could ward off one of the potential pitfalls of being remote, a tendency to only view the meeting through one's own experience and chosen medium.
While there will certainly be exceptions, the majority of managers have returned to the brick‐and‐mortar office to lead their teams as they did pre‐pandemic. In many cases, though, their team has not joined them full‐time, five days a week. Even for teams that designate a certain day for fully in‐person meetings, unscheduled meetings happen on a fairly regular basis outside of the planned “everyone in the same room” day. Hybrid meetings happen, but when the leader of those meetings is always conducting them from the office, that can create blind spots.
If a manager is working in a more traditional model of being in the office five days a week, there might be a tendency to always host those hybrid meetings as an in‐person attendee, gathering in the same room with team members who are also in the office that day. It might seem logical. Why not take advantage of the conference room that has been fully equipped (hopefully) to accommodate hybrid meetings? But here's the rub: if a manager always leads a meeting from an on‐site conference room, it may be easy for them to forget what it's like to join virtually.
Why is this a problem? Plenty of research has highlighted how much more taxing it is to attend a meeting virtually than it is to attend in person. The results of a study by Microsoft illustrate this quite well. Researchers found that video calls, especially those without enough breaks, increase stress and brain noise (Microsoft 2021). The study measured the brain impacts of two different meeting styles. In the first meeting style, participants were asked to sit through a two‐hour‐long video call with no breaks. In the second style, the two‐hour meeting was broken up into four half‐hour chunks with 10‐minute breaks in between. During the long meeting with no breaks, participants showed higher levels of beta waves, which are related to stress, anxiety, and concentration. What's more, the longer the meeting went on, the higher the levels of stress rose. When the two‐hour meeting became a series of shorter meetings with breaks in between, the participants’ levels of stress decreased significantly and their level of engagement rose.
Why is this observation important within the hybrid construct? Because even though some people will be meeting in the traditional face‐to‐face way, other attendees will still be joining through video and therefore experience these same challenges. When everyone is joining a meeting via video, that shared experience raises the awareness of the need for breaks. However, if some attendees are in‐person, and others are dialing in by phone as well as appearing via video, that level of awareness, especially that of the meeting leader, who is likely in‐person too, may be diminished.
How could this play out in a real‐world scenario? Let's say a meeting leader (we'll call her Jane) has brought the team together and laid out a rather ambitious agenda. Five people are gathered in the same room with her at the corporate headquarters. Three of her people are working from home today and have chosen to call in via videoconference. The team has a lot of ground to cover, but Jane is excited about the new initiatives they've been assigned. She launches into the agenda full‐bore. The conversation is animated and productive. In fact, she's doing a good job of pulling out participation from all team members. About 45 minutes in, she looks at the clock. They're only a third of the way through the agenda. She considers taking a break and even does a quick gut check. Does she feel like she needs a break? Actually, she's feeling just fine and even energized by the progress that the team is making through the line items. She opts to keep plowing through. Meanwhile, her team members who are joining via video are starting to feel their mental focus wane. A 10‐minute break would have allowed for a quick stretch, a run to the restroom, or even the opportunity to snag another cup of coffee. Instead, the meeting runs a full two hours before it's officially adjourned. The in‐person attendees applaud the effectiveness of that meeting. Look at everything they accomplished! The video attendees are exhausted.
This fictional scenario can easily play out in the real‐world if leaders don't make efforts to put themselves in the shoes of all of their attendees, regardless of how they are joining the meeting. It can be difficult to remember what it's like to experience a meeting through videoconferencing, especially if you always facilitate the discussion from the conference room with colocated team members, but there is a solution: rotate the way you show up to lead the meeting.
For some meetings, go ahead and grab your folks, and head to the conference room that you've equipped with cameras, microphones, and monitors to allow for a truly effective hybrid meeting. Kick off that meeting on the video collaboration platform of choice so those who are remote can join you. But then, for some other meetings, lead them through the lens of your webcam by joining virtually instead of in person. To effectively lead a hybrid meeting, you need to understand the perspective and needs of everyone who shows up across all the modalities. Rotating how you join and lead meetings will allow you to have a wide enough view of the meeting experience that will better ensure that you don't have blind spots … like a tendency to not take enough breaks!
And speaking of breaks, leaders can leverage some technology tools to remind themselves to insert breaks in meetings. For example, Microsoft created settings in Outlook that allow individuals or organizations to change the default settings to shorten the length of meetings by 5, 10, or 15 minutes when using Microsoft Teams (Microsoft 2021). If an organization so chooses, a 30‐minute meeting can become 25 minutes by default. The intentional insertion of those forced breaks can make all the difference, allowing for a mental reboot and a less exhausting experience on either side of the 10‐minute‐break divide.
When leading a hybrid meeting, it's imperative to ward off potential communication siloes that can occur when participants are both in the office and not. Meeting best practices already call for clear communication before, during, and after a meeting (Mroz et al. 2018). When people are attending meetings using different mediums, this takes on even greater urgency. Stanford's Matt Abrahams urges meeting leaders to be mindful of this: “The way you summarize a meeting becomes really important. Ask people to summarize what they heard to ensure fidelity was high.” In other words, make sure the folks who joined remotely understand and have access to the discussion points. Why is this especially important when hybrid? Because those who join virtually are at a disadvantage when it comes to receiving a message. The highest level of communication fidelity is found when in person. While video communication is a close second, there is still a deficit that needs to be taken into account.
Great hybrid teams put extra emphasis on keeping track of action items and who is responsible for them, and then socializing them afterward for accountability. They keep all of this information in a place where it is accessible by everyone to ensure transparency and inclusivity. Sometimes that information is in the form of a text, a Word document, or a PDF, but more and more often, that information is found in the form of recorded video.
Most video collaboration platforms allow meetings to be recorded. Those videos can serve two purposes. Someone who attended the meeting live might want to watch the video to ensure they heard something correctly the first time through. The video can also be viewed by team members who may not have been able to make the meeting live but still need to be up to speed. Some companies choose to record every meeting. Others don't record any meeting. Often, it depends upon the industry and the regulatory environment.
The bottom line is that archiving the meeting information in an accessible way is a best practice for any meeting modality but when meeting hybrid, it is critical.
You may be familiar with the term “All Hands Meeting” – the enterprise‐wide type of meeting where executives can relay important information to the entire company. While we may argue that many of these meetings would be better delivered as a recorded message, the popularity and relative simplicity of hosting a large meeting on‐site and beaming it to those who are remote might seem all too enticing. It's instantaneous. It's efficient. (It's also the most expensive meeting your organization can hold when you consider the hourly rate of all those who are in attendance.) But it's also not the kind of meeting you want to heavily rely on for better business outcomes.
Those massive meetings may have their place, but it's the smaller meetings that really make the difference in terms of productivity, according to research by McKinsey & Company. Through extensive interviews with executives across the globe, they found that organizations that have been productivity leaders throughout the pandemic relied on small connections between colleagues to move the needle. In fact, two‐thirds of productivity leaders said that these “microtransactions” increased during the pandemic (McKinsey & Company 2021). The study authors strongly advocated for that practice to continue to harness the productivity gains when hybrid.
A recent study by Joe and his team supports these findings by McKinsey & Company (Allen et al. 2020). In Joe's study, he wanted to see how effective meetings connect to team task performance. The obvious answer is that better meetings mean better performance. Unsurprisingly, the research indicated that, indeed, better meetings mean better performance, but the interesting part was that the smaller the meeting, the better the performance. The sweet spot in number of attendees seems to be between five and seven people. So, to get the most engagement from effective meetings, managers and meeting leaders must keep them small. Size matters!
Those smaller meetings also help to foster relationships when teams are not always colocated. For companies that do hybrid well, it's all about frequent manager/employee check‐ins – not as a means to check up, but rather as a way to build ties, something observed by Jay Hyett: “What I've really appreciated at both Envato and Culture Amp is trust is given to you implicitly on the first day you arrive. People know you are there to do a job and do the work. There are really tight feedback loops with genuine connection points with your manager. They know everyone comes with the best intentions to get the job done.” Those one‐on‐one touchpoints need to be prioritized and their cadence increased to ensure that communication is flowing smoothly to all.
As this part has demonstrated so far, hybrid meetings are complex communication network environments that require deliberate efforts to foster participation, enable communication, and inspire action by leaders and attendees. However, we also demonstrated how the hybrid meeting environment changes as the makeup of the group, their modality for communicating, and the number of people attending changes. The network changes, and so the effort and approach need to adjust as well. We've given you some specific recommendations that may apply to your meeting, but given the many incarnations of a hybrid meeting, they may not. You need feedback from those who are in your own particular brand of hybrid meetings to ensure that your efforts are working for all. That's why it is so important to add post‐meeting postmortems to your standard operating procedures.
We recommend that after a hybrid meeting, individual leaders, or perhaps even the whole group as well, should engage in a post‐meeting postmortem. This is a common practice in many organizations that engage in high‐intensity, sometimes dangerous activities; they use a post‐meeting postmortem so they can continue do their work safely (Allen, Baran, and Scott 2010). How do they do that? They engage in after‐action reviews or debriefs to learn from their experiences and do better in the future. While your hybrid meetings may not hold the same gravitas as the work of firefighters, healthcare workers, military patrols, or nuclear power plant operators, you can still derive a ton of value by using a version of their tool to help you engage in continuous improvement efforts (Allen, Reiter‐Palmon, Crowe, and Scott 2018).
Building on the actual cue cards firefighters carry and use for their postmortems, we provide here a series of questions that a meeting leader or attendee or even the group can go over together. During the early stages of the transition to hybrid meetings, these questions should be asked after every hybrid meeting, especially as policies and procedures evolve. As the responses help identify things to try and things to continue to do, the leader, attendee, or group will hopefully find a homeostasis in their meeting behavior that is wonderful and worth continuing. Here's the checklist of questions for your post‐meeting postmortem.
Post‐Meeting Postmortem Checklist
| Question | Notes |
|---|---|
| 1. What was the purpose of our meeting? | |
| 2. What went well? | |
| 3. What could have gone better? | |
| 4. What might we have done differently? | |
| 5. What will we do differently next time? | |
| 6. Whom should we share this with? |
In looking across these questions, you'll notice that we start with something basic. What was the purpose of our meeting? Too often, we leave a meeting wondering if we accomplished anything at all. Answering that question may be painful at first but is truly diagnostic. The rest of the questions uncover what the group is doing well in their hybrid meetings and what they are not doing well.
If a leader fills out this assessment on their own, it can serve as a valuable exercise. But imagine what they could learn if they used it to gather feedback from their team, either through an email request for comments or through a brief conversation with their team at the end of a meeting that just occurred.
Also, notice that these questions are generic enough that a person could use these for any meeting type, not just for hybrid. This was a deliberate choice. We hope that our readers will embrace this continuous improvement idea for all their meetings, with a particular emphasis on their hybrid meetings.
While the meeting leader does set the stage by setting expectations, establishing participation norms, and carefully curating the meeting process itself, all of the responsibility doesn't rest solely on their shoulders. Attendees also need to step up and adjust their behaviors as well, which is where we turn our attention in Part Three.