The forecasts were dire. Take this headline from an October 2020 article in Forbes: “Work from Home Fallout: Productivity Up, Innovation Down” (McKendrick 2020). The article cited the results of a Microsoft survey of some 9,000 managers and employees across Europe that found 82% reporting productivity levels that were holding steady or increasing. That was juxtaposed with a concerning statistic: of those surveyed, only 40% considered their companies to be innovative, a 16‐point drop from the year before.
Over the course of the time spent fully remote, many a manager and senior leader lamented the loss of face‐to‐face time, which they considered to be at the heart of developing new products and insights. But the anecdotal evidence runs to the contrary. Innovation actually accelerated across a wide spectrum of industries. Not only did some organizations come up with new ways of moving the needle by reconfiguring and creating new work flows that fit with their virtual reality (think healthcare and the availability of telehealth, for example), but they also figured out how to innovate and even launch new products and lines of business.
Allow us to share one such example from Pearson:
“We've been wildly successful,” says CTO Steve Santana, who oversaw the development of Pearson+, which revolutionized how college students consume textbooks through a subscription model. The idea was hatched about nine months into the pandemic in December 2020, recalls Steve: “I was in the parking lot at a Best Buy buying Christmas presents where I was going over my budget numbers for Pearson+ on a Microsoft Teams call, everyone with ‘video on’ to establish trust.”
Work on the app began in earnest in February 2021 with input from people all over globe. Team members from the UK, Ukraine, India, and both coasts of the United States worked within their own time zones, with even the primary customer research done virtually. As they approached the product launch in late July, hybrid meetings came back into play. Steve continues: “Toward the end, we had some groups of testers that were in conference rooms, and it became more like the way we were before the pandemic, where you have a bunch of people online and you have a room or a couple of rooms all meeting at once.” What was most remarkable, though, was the end result. “This product has been delivered with our best quality and with the least amount of noise,” Steve says with pride.
Innovation may not be defined by where it happens, but will be seriously limited if organizations don't empower collaboration with the right tools that it requires regardless of location. When hybrid, the way to do that is often reliant on technology that allows information to be put forth, played with, and stored in an inclusive way.
In this chapter, we will explore tools to:
“If hybrid meetings are not productive and successful, with a high degree of inclusivity for all participants, then hybrid work itself is at risk,” says Mike Fasciani of Gartner, who coined the term “collaboration equity” in an article for TechTarget (Irei 2021), where he sounded the alarm for companies that don't retool for the new way of working.
When meeting attendees are both in‐person and remote, their ability to participate and influence decisions can be out of balance. Maybe the in‐person attendees can dominate the discussion by not giving their remote colleagues an opportunity to cut in. Perhaps the remote attendees can more easily analyze the documents being shared on the videoconferencing platform because they can see them more clearly on their own individual screens. With so many businesses counting on and investing in hybrid, overlooking the potential inequities jeopardizes those plans for flexible work. Collaboration equity in a meeting means creating a level playing field for all attendees, allowing them to be on equal footing with colleagues in how they contribute and interact with each other. It means that meeting leaders, whether part of the in‐person group or online, have to work to enable equal contribution in these collaboration environments.
Step one in creating collaboration equity is to look to the past. When practically everyone migrated to video collaboration platforms as a result of the pandemic, not only did people learn to embrace video as a way to communicate, they also learned how to use some of the additional functionalities the platforms provided that filled in some of the communication gaps, like using chat to make an announcement to the entire group (“Going off video to answer the doorbell”). As we transition to hybrid meetings, organizations have an opportunity to leverage some of those practices born in the pandemic by continuing to use the tools that helped to create those new communication patterns.
One way to do that when hybrid is to have everyone still join the meeting from their own individual devices, even if they are in a conference room beside some of their colleagues. That's not to say that these colocated teammates are all using their own laptop cameras and built‐in microphones and speakers. There's too much risk in audio feedback. Instead, the in‐office cohort is represented on the screen by the meeting room camera (or cameras) and using the audio setup in the meeting room itself. You may be wondering, “What's the point of that?”
The point is this: having everyone join from their own laptops or other personal devices allows everyone to use the other platform features that they relied on when fully virtual. We're talking about the tools like chat, emoji reactions, polls, and other functionalities that helped people communicate better when they were all remote. When a meeting is made up of people who are in the same room and people who are virtual, these tools can still help to provide equal opportunity for everyone regardless of location. After all, we learned quite a bit during our “suddenly virtual” experience, and there's no need to throw away these learnings when they could unlock better collaboration and more communication parity. If you are in a meeting where at least some of the attendees are remote, consider the continued use of:
For organizations looking to retrofit their workspaces to allow for hybrid meetings, certain violations of meeting equity may be easy to identify because there will be tangible representations of an office‐only orientation.
“Your company is either remote‐first or office‐first, and you can tell by walking into a hybrid office. If there is a physical whiteboard that is not connected to the internet, you are office‐first. Rip the thing down,” says Darren Murph, head of remote at GitLab.
Darren strongly endorses looking at all workflows, processes, and technology through the eyes of the remote worker who will be part of the hybrid equation. He stresses, “You have to remove all vestiges of nonconnected work if you ever hope that this is going to work. Replace the whiteboard with an LCD that streams photos and Slack messages from people outside of the office that serve as a constant reminder that your world is bigger than where you are currently standing.”
Ripping things down, figuratively and literally, does require you to stand other things up, but what kinds of tools should you prioritize to empower collaboration during hybrid meetings? Once again, technology is changing faster than any static book can account for, so we will talk more about what kinds of tools are needed, rather than specific products that might be leaders today but laggards by tomorrow.
As much as an organization might love color‐coded sticky notes and the smell of dry‐erase markers, anything that requires in‐person presence will sideline the remote attendees. Businesses are responding to that paradigm shift by investing in virtual whiteboard technology at a rate not seen before. According to Irwin Lazar of Metrigy, more than 40% of companies are looking at deploying them (Finnell 2021). Unlike physical whiteboards whose content can be erased, digital whiteboarding applications allow for everyone to draw or write on it regardless of location without concerns that what is created will be threatened by the cleaning crew. Virtual whiteboards allow for equitable participation during live brainstorming sessions, and equitable access to the information afterward by storing what was co‐created online. Additionally, both in‐office and remote team members can continue to build upon it over time because it's a living document.
Sometimes collaboration needs to occur around a document or report that does not lend itself to the whiteboarding process. If a team needs to create, revise, or edit a written document, sharing that document on the screen is essential so that everyone can stay on the same digital page. Real‐time revisions in something like a Google Doc can be seen by all and added to by anyone who has been given editing authority. In a hybrid meeting, one person can share the document for all to see, but then everyone can manipulate it according to the level of privilege they've been assigned, whether it's as an editor, a commenter, or a viewer.
Consider the alternative: someone shares a static document on a video call and plenty of people want to make edits. The suggestions for new wording come in from all sides and the poor person who is sharing the document is doing their best to keep up. The process for revising that one document is clunky and time‐consuming, and the majority of the burden is on the shoulders of the person who originally shared it.
With something like a Google Doc, multiple people can tweak the content simultaneously and the revisions are saved as you go along. Co‐authoring becomes a truly collaborative experience in both the execution and the final product.
For all the reasons we mentioned in earlier chapters, achieving equitable participation for all hybrid meeting attendees can be a challenge. Strategies like inviting a moderator to monitor and prod for input from everyone or having an in‐room buddy are part of the potential solution, but sometimes it can still be difficult for people to get into the conversation queue. The technology of today can assist you with this important task.
For example, Microsoft Teams has a feature called “raise hands” that is designed to reduce the cognitive burden for the meeting leader by adding automation to the participation process. When people click to raise their virtual hands, Teams sorts participants in order of whose hand was raised first, taking the guesswork out of it for the meeting leader. This is a great start, but there is a growing body of innovation that seeks to go beyond that and actually monitor participation in a data‐based way.
Shiraz Cupala, director of product for Microsoft Teams, offers this prediction: “Over time, you'll start to see us make it easier for people to understand who hasn't had a chance to speak and to engage in more ways to make sure you've heard everyone's voice that needs to be and wants to be heard. So, you'll start to see tools to help you make your meetings more inclusive.”
Joe and Karin's wish list for new innovations includes tools that could alert the meeting leader when they or others have spoken for a long time. Maybe a light could flash to let an attendee know that their comment has been longer than a specified time? Perhaps it could incorporate features that would indicate if the meeting was mostly presentation‐based or discussion‐based, and would identify who the primary presenter will be to allow them to speak beyond the typical limit. The idea would be to establish guardrails on participation to ensure equity in an automated way, similar to the systems used for political debates (even though many a politician has seemed to ignore those flashing lights indicating “time's up”).
Even if you have managed to establish collaboration equity during the live meeting, what happens before and after a meeting are possible danger zones. That's why you need to leverage tools that consider the entire meeting continuum of collaboration. After all, meetings aren't just real‐time events. It's a matter of considering the entire meeting lifecycle, according to Microsoft's Shiraz Cupala:
What does it mean for a meeting to be effective? It's not about the meeting. It's about the work we're trying to get done together. It's about communicating with each other. Oftentimes, that happens before the meeting even starts. Obviously, during the meeting, we want to get together to have a real‐time conversation, to work through a problem or to brainstorm and ideate. Then we want to take all that value that's in the meeting and make sure we capture it, so we can follow up and continue collaborating after the meeting.
The need to capture the pre‐meeting and the post‐meeting communication is consistent with meeting science. One of Joe's earlier studies focused on the kinds of conversations that occurred as people gathered for the meeting (Allen, Lehmann‐Willenbrock, and Landowski 2014). What he found is that people talked about all sorts of things, some work‐related and some not, but the science showed that pre‐meeting conversations that focused on smalltalk, like last night's game, the latest show they streamed, or their kids, actually made the meeting better overall. Specifically, the smalltalk served as the social lubrication to get individuals who may initially be quiet to contribute later on in the meeting. All of that pre‐meeting and post‐meeting conversation not only serves to educate and inform meeting attendees but it also enables a sense of team cohesion (pre‐meeting) while fostering action after the official meeting (post‐meeting).
Prior to the pandemic, most corporate communication before and after a meeting was almost exclusively via email. Now, much of that communication is being done through channels created on collaboration platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Google Workspace, which link all of the various collaboration tools together.
This is music to the ears of Phil Simon, a recognized collaboration and technology expert, and author of the award‐winning book Reimagining Collaboration: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and the Post‐COVID World of Work. In 2021, Phil used his book to introduce what he calls the “Hub‐Spoke Model of Collaboration.” He writes that Slack, Microsoft Teams, and other internal collaboration hubs can stitch together previously fragmented tools and communication mediums.
So, what is the Hub‐Spoke Model? Let's allow Phil to explain:
A hub is a general‐use application for all communication and collaboration. Say that I want to send you a file, or do a video call, or send you a message. Everything takes place in the hub. By contrast, a spoke is a piece of software that serves a specific purpose. Examples include DocuSign for signing documents, Workday for ERP, and Salesforce for CRM. Leaders need to stop thinking about all of these applications and systems as disjointed components. Rather, they should start viewing their technology as part of a single, holistic gestalt. The Hub‐Spoke Model of Collaboration stitches together all of the important applications and keeps everything in one place. It lets organizations build and maintain a shared and central knowledge repository.
So, what should you look for in a collaboration hub? Here are some top considerations:
These collaboration hubs hold files in a wide variety of forms well beyond just text. Uploading a video file of a recorded meeting for those who missed the session, as we mentioned in Chapter 7, is just the start. This reorientation beyond the written word creates a whole new opportunity for collaboration outside of the meeting that makes the time spent in the session worthwhile.
Joe often talks about how the first type of meeting people should delete from their calendar is the information‐sharing meeting. If all that is going to happen in a meeting is someone spouting information at people, then that can be done in a number of other, less time‐consuming ways. We already mentioned email and other asynchronous text‐based options. But, if you're like us, one more email just might blow up your inbox forever. That's a whole other issue that others have lamented for years: the ever‐growing, ever‐annoying inbox of emails to process. Therefore, let's consider other options, including asynchronous video and audio messages.
With the rise of video call fatigue and the overall digital exhaustion due to the influx of information across a variety of channels, many organizations have turned to recorded video to disseminate information to both internal and external stakeholders. Video allows for the message to be delivered with greater nuance, accuracy, and richness, and also offers flexibility for the end user. Both PC and Mac laptops have this recording capability baked in, so it's only a matter of uploading the file to the collaboration platform of choice. Additionally, there are now a bevy of software companies that make this process even easier and more robust.
During the pandemic, enterprise video companies experienced tremendous growth. When people were forced to speak through a camera, they eventually began to embrace it more. Vidyard, a leading video platform for businesses, reported 250% growth from 2020 to 2021, driven largely by customers in sales and marketing who were hoping to better engage their customers and prospects (Duckett 2021). However, the use of recorded video internally has risen dramatically as well, and continues to play a large role in how organizations communicate – whether they're updating colleagues on a project or speaking to the enterprise as a C‐level executive.
It's a common practice at Culture Amp, according to Jay Hyett: “I'm really encouraged by all of the asynchronous work being done at all levels. Our CEO, for example, will put out an update on a recorded message on a Slack channel so we can all watch it at our own time. It's not like you are going to miss what was said because he said it during a meeting in Melbourne and you live in San Francisco.”
Jim Szafranski, CEO of Prezi, a communications software company, offers these suggestions for integrating asynchronous video into the corporate communications workflow (Kalita 2021):
Even though we are advocates for video, we do recognize that there are times we just aren't camera ready but still want to send a message with nuance, personality, and tone. There's another medium that is rising in popularity – asynchronous audio. Like video, you can say a lot in a little bit of time – and if you didn't like what you said the first time through, you can easily go back and re‐record before you hit Send.
“Voice is high bandwidth. It's high resolution. You can get out a lot more information with voice than you can by typing,” says Justin Mitchell, CEO of Yac, a voice collaboration platform that allows users to record themselves and send out audio snippets to teammates. Need to update a colleague about an interaction you had with a sales target? Rather than sending over a calendar invite for a video call, you can send a voice message with searchable transcription. Have a status report you need to share with your project team? Rather than sending a 400‐word email with a screenshot attached, record yourself voicing over a screen share to deliver it in a richer way.
Having audio files that you can listen to at a time that's right for you reflects the prioritization of flexible work. It allows you to stay on task and choose when to interrupt your own work flow, something that is not lost on Yac's CEO, who appreciates that you can consume the information passively: “One of my favorite things to do throughout the day is to let my recorded team updates pile up for a little bit,” says Justin. “I will go for a walk and hit my ‘Play all’ button in Yac, It's just like a miniature podcast. It's a great way to understand what my team is working on without having to be strapped to my desk and staring at a video call.”
The use of richer media to convey messages efficiently and powerfully is a positive step, but many companies are also incorporating another tool that allows for even more inclusive collaboration: captioning.
Making all communication visible for all is a key component of hybrid meeting success, but if you are deaf or hard of hearing, a video without captions loses most if not all of its value. The problem is compounded when you are dealing with a multinational team that doesn't all speak the same language. This is the very scenario that prompted the birth of CaptionHub, a software company that specializes in amazingly accurate captioning with multilingual translation. CEO Tom Bridges recalls the business problem they were asked to solve by a global tech company:
The head of the retail division was giving a weekly talk to her team as an internal communications exercise, but her team speaks 26 different languages. Traditionally, it would take a week to localize this five‐minute video into 26 different languages. So, it instantly made second‐class citizens out of all of those people who don't speak English. This company, quite rightly in my opinion, said, “That's not acceptable. We need perfection, but we need to accelerate it. We need you to turn it around in a day.” And so that's where CaptionHub was born.
Captioning and subtitling will break down barriers, but it's not just the ability to communicate. It's how you can communicate and how fast you can communicate. That time to market is a really key part of what we're doing.
In a virtual and hybrid workplace always at risk of information silos, any tools that help break down walls to clear and inclusive communication is not just a “nice to have,” it's a “need to have.” CaptionHub experienced tremendous growth during the pandemic as companies recognized the need, and interest has not waned with the transition to hybrid. With video usage proliferating across the corporate landscape, captions unlock access to information that might otherwise be untouchable for some.
“A really key part of what we're doing is we're making video searchable … it's text that has a timecode,” says Tom, who considers captions to be a critical part of any company's video strategy. “A big part of what we're doing is enabling that information to be shared in a more digestible, searchable form.”
Given the burgeoning science related to the benefits of diversity, equity, and inclusion, tools like these may hold the key to enabling greater creativity in organizations. Accessible information for all leads to greater diversity of thought, unleashing both higher levels of performance and innovation.
CaptionHub has also proved the skeptics wrong who thought innovation would be hampered or even halted if people weren't colocated. They recently launched live products with real‐time transcription and translation – products that were launched with their team dispersed across continents.
“To say that you can't innovate without being in the same room … I don't buy that,” says Tom. “I think we just need a different approach. I do genuinely believe that modern tools are working really well.”
Over the past two chapters, we've discussed ways to set yourself up for hybrid meeting success from an equipment and technology standpoint. Creating presence and enabling collaboration for everyone, whether they are joining in person or remote, are two key pillars for an effective hybrid meeting environment. At the end of this chapter, you'll find a checklist of hybrid meeting technology considerations based on what we presented in both chapters.
However, just having the tools does not mean people will use them well … or even use them at all. In Part Five, we will talk about training, arguably the biggest factor in the success or failure of your hybrid meetings, and we'll offer you a framework for evaluating your transition to this modern meeting modality.
Hybrid Meeting Technology Considerations
| How are we creating “Presence for All”? | Yes or No |
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[ ] Yes [ ] No |
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| TOTAL YES | ___________ |
| How are we enabling “Collaboration for All”? | |
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[ ] Yes [ ] No |
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[ ] Yes [ ] No |
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[ ] Yes [ ] No |
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[ ] Yes [ ] No |
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[ ] Yes [ ] No |
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[ ] Yes [ ] No |
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[ ] Yes [ ] No |
| TOTAL YES | ___________ |