Chapter 12
Skill Up for Hybrid Collaboration Success

Applause … rolling, rousing applause. Not something most IT people are used to hearing from their fellow employees, but that's indeed what kept happening to Eric Taylor.

As an IT specialist at a leading business analytics company, he was in charge of teaching people how to move from an old Avaya phone system to Skype, which required them to use their computers to make their calls. The initial announcement generated some passionate responses, Eric recalls: “There was literally one gentleman on Yammer who said, ‘You can have my phone when you pry it from my cold dead hands.’”

That might have made some IT people do an immediate about‐face, but Eric and his team pressed on with a strategy that ended up not only driving user adoption but also creating fans. They did a series of town hall training sessions for departments across the enterprise. Eric explains, “The way we drove adoption was literally me getting up on stage or in front of a conference room with 40 or 50 people at a time and showing them on the screen: ‘Look, first you click here. Then you do this and then you click here.’” That step‐by‐step live tutorial was just what his fellow workers needed to build their confidence. They could master that new way of communicating because Eric showed them how.

He also took the opportunity to explain the reasoning behind the move, something that he recommends to any IT department rolling out new tools. “I am the biggest proponent of explaining ‘The Why.’ Don't just do something. Tell them why you're doing it because then they can kind of conceptualize it.” In the case of the move to Skype, Eric explained how much more robust the system was and the improved functionality that allowed them to carry it with them anywhere in the world. He even told them about the app that they could install on their phones, and suddenly, the naysayers became the proponents. Eric recalls, “Then that guy who said, ‘You can have my phone when you pry it from my cold dead hands,’ starts to say, ‘That's awesome. How do I get it?’ The conversation totally changes, but you have to train folks.”

The role of trainer is not one that most IT people envisioned they would be asked to fill, but with technology being such a core part of the move to hybrid, it's a role that is necessary and surprisingly rewarding. Eric relates, “It was bizarre to be an IT guy teaching people how to use an IT solution, but at the end, they would literally applaud you like you had just starred in a movie. So, training is key. And it can be rough at first, but it pays dividends.”

But the payoff will only be partial if you focus solely on training on the tech. You also need to train people on the processes required to make hybrid work. In this chapter, we will discuss why organizations need to do both as part of their transition to hybrid meetings, and how to craft a training process that, in the words of Eric Taylor, “pays dividends.”

In this chapter, we will explore:

• The potential performance drop due to the hybrid meeting learning curve and how to avoid it
• The components of effective training programs
• What needs to be in every hybrid meeting and collaboration training
• How, with a little training, the future could be very collaborative

Avoiding the Performance Drop

The overwhelming concern when everyone was sent home, besides the virus (as if that wasn't enough), was whether we all would be able to work effectively while remote. Would the great remote‐work experiment work for the majority of knowledge workers across many different industries? As we've already explored in previous chapters, the surprising answer was yes! In fact, some organizations that took care of their workers, providing them with resources and tools to make their remote workstation effective, saw performance gains. That was definitely not what many people had predicted, although social scientists who study work–family balance and alternative work schedules thought it might happen this way. Most of their research supported the notion that people who were granted alternative work schedules or even remote work before the pandemic were just as or more productive than their colocated colleagues in the office (Bolino, Kelemen, and Matthews 2021).

Now with the relaxation of pandemic restrictions, we have a new set of questions:

• Will hybrid work create a performance drop?
• Will bringing people back to the office while allowing others to remain remote, either some or part of the time, cause unforeseen problems?
• Will people be able to collaborate effectively in their meetings when there are three people in a room and three people on camera?

The answer to these questions is the most common response from academics across the organizational sciences: it depends!

Anecdotally, we often consider anything that requires a lot of effort to master as having a steep learning curve. What do we mean by that? Well, essentially the learning curve is a graphical representation of the proficiency of a person at performing a task over time (Epple, Argote, and Devadas 1991). Figure 12.1 shows an example.

In other words, for the majority of tasks, people tend to get better at doing things the longer they do them. You probably noticed this with virtual meetings, as the number of “Hey, you're on mute!” statements actually started to decline for teams that started engaging in the best practices previously identified. Basically, we got better at using the tools and remembering where and when to find the mute button.

Like our virtual meeting experience, hybrid meetings and the collaboration before, during, and after them will have a learning curve. It will take time and persistence to get better at them, and a performance drop is to be expected. However, the questions leaders and individuals need to consider are:

Figure 12.1 The Learning Curve

• How much of a performance falloff is okay to them?
• What are they willing to do to mitigate one?

There are three things you must do to avoid a performance drop when it comes to hybrid meetings and collaboration:

1. Have the right tools and equipment
2. Have the right training on the tools and equipment
3. Level up the skills needed to run hybrid meetings effectively

Training on the Tools

With respect to our first two points – having the right tools and equipment, and having the right training – IT leaders in organizations are suddenly thrust into the reluctant superhero role, and if they play it well, they may earn the applause of their coworkers just like Eric Taylor did. It will be well warranted. After all, they have had to be at the forefront of the software and hardware solutions hitting the market in response to the transition to hybrid, and they've had to make decisions about which of those tools to put in the hands or at the fingertips of employees.

When virtual, organizations and their people were in emergency mode. They weren't looking for what worked best. They were looking for what worked – period. Sometimes that meant using software that wasn't the official company option, but that has changed. Gone are the early days of everyone just using whatever videoconferencing platform they wanted. Now IT organizations are standardizing on one, maybe two platforms that serve distinct purposes, perhaps one for internal meetings and another for meetings with external stakeholders.

But simply having the tools available does not guarantee they are used. Karin saw this first‐hand during the pandemic when she trained countless people how to communicate through a webcam. Part of the coaching process involved helping people to spruce up their personal production value – making sure their video, audio, lighting, and background were as polished as possible. When a client would show up for an individual coaching session with a pixelated or fuzzy image on the screen, Karin would ask what kind of camera they were using. Often, they would say it was their laptop webcam, but then they would add, “Yeah, we were sent webcams by corporate but mine's still in the box.” Karin would ask them to grab that box from the closet, and then walk them through the process of setting it up. Without exception, every person was amazed by the difference in video quality that the external webcam produced, but until Karin insisted, they didn't consider it a priority to take it out of the box.

In order to keep tools from gathering dust, figuratively and literally, IT personnel will need to be able to advocate for the right tools for employees and also be willing to provide group and individual instruction on how they work. Leaving people to figure it out on their own is putting too much faith in both their ability to do so and their willingness or availability to set aside time to train themselves. By designating certain days or even hours to train people on a new piece of software or the new meeting room setup, it demonstrates to employees that what they are learning truly matters. It is important enough to warrant taking them away from their day‐to‐day duties so they can learn how to use new tools that are pivotal to hybrid meeting success. Think about the signal that sends.

When it comes down to it, it's also in the best interest of the IT department. A few group training sessions to roll out new software or hardware could save them from countless tech support calls from people who are likely to ask the same questions over and over again, which can be a bit mind‐numbing for the IT folks.

Within every enterprise, there's a wide array of technical skill. Assuming everyone will be able to adopt and adapt to new technology is a fool's errand. Take the time to train your people on the tech you have spent so much time and money implementing. When you lower the barrier to entry by helping employees understand how to use it, you will get a much higher return on your investment.

Having the right equipment is simply the ticket to play, but if you stop there, you've missed the third leg of our three‐legged stool. Training your people on how to manage their team or themselves during a hybrid meeting is also essential, and most people new to hybrid won't understand what that requires. So, let's first review what a good training program requires.

The Six Components of Effective Training Programs

As an organizational scientist, Joe has both taught the topic of training to graduate students as well as developed and implemented training programs within organizations. Following the best practices endorsed by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP 2021), there are six components to effective training programs. We will address each of the six components here in general and then apply them to a representative knowledge worker organization in the next section.

1. Pretraining environment. The pretraining environment refers to the situational characteristics within the organization that will enable or constrain the training. This includes the individual differences among the learners, the support for the training from the organization and its leaders, and the level at which the training is communicated, from basic to advanced. Depending on the nature of these characteristics, the training will need to vary in its depth, breadth, and components.
2. Needs assessment. The needs assessment refers to the process of uncovering what the training needs to accomplish. What are the goals of the organization and the overall tasks that need to be completed? Additionally, what is the status of people's knowledge level relative to the training topic? Depending on the organization and the nature of the training, different levels of the training may be needed to aid novices all the way to experts in a given area. The needs assessment should help identify these differences and help determine the scope of training that may be required.
3. Training design. Once the needs assessment is done, the training can then be designed to deliver the content. What topics will be covered? Where will the training be held and in what format? For example, will the training be onsite, offsite, or hosted virtually or hybrid? That decision has a huge impact on how the instructor will go about delivering the content and is a good first question to ask once the needs assessment is completed.
4. Training implementation. Training implementation is all about the execution of it, but it also includes how an organization ensures everyone who needs the training is able to receive it. Some organizations may mandate the trainings. Some are even required by various federal or state laws, such as training mandated by Title 9. Regardless, implementation is all about carrying out the planned training and being flexible to adjust the approach as needed for the learner.
5. Training transfer. Training transfer refers to the degree to which the training is used at three levels:
   • First, do they start using the training materials, the newly learned skills, and the behaviors taught to them while on the job?
   • Second, do they persist in using these new skills and behaviors over time?
   • Third, do they adapt the skills and behaviors as the job changes or new tools are introduced? In other words, does the training stick, or does it go in one ear and out the other? Joe often jokes that he thinks there's a delete button on the back of some students' heads. It seems like when they leave the classroom, they tap the button, and all the learning that just happened is erased. What it more likely represents is a lack of training transfer, which requires some motivation on the part of the learner. Self‐motivated individuals may not have a problem with training transfer, but less motivated people might, and that's where the pretraining environment becomes evident as the key to the success of a training initiative. How much external motivation is given to learners by their managers or the organization as a whole to get trained and use the new skills? If the managers or the organization do not exhibit buy‐in to the importance of the training, it is unlikely that training transfer will occur.
6. Training evaluation. This refers to the process of assessing whether the training did what it was supposed to do. Typically, this is done on four levels, following the most studied and used training evaluation model by Donald Kirkpatrick (2009).
   • Level 1 is the reaction level. At this level we simply ask what participants thought of the training. Did they like it? Was it engaging? Was it relevant?
   • Level 2 is the learning level. In this one, we ask about the knowledge and skills that they were expected to acquire. This might take the form of a test in some cases.
   • Level 3 is behavior. We want to know the degree to which the learners apply what they learned once they are back on the job. We mentioned training transfer earlier. This level is where we measure it.
   • Level 4 is results. This is commonly known as training evaluation. That is, did we get the outcomes we wanted from the training? Outcomes from most trainings include performance gains as a result of the application of the new skills to the job.

Think about your last training experience on the job. Did you witness all six components occurring? It is unfortunately uncommon for organizations or the consulting firms they hire to incorporate every step discussed here. Of particular neglect are levels three and four: the transfer of training and the training evaluation components. Why? Because if it doesn't work, do the people who championed it in the organization really want to know that? It's likely the consulting firm that delivered the training doesn't want to know, either. If it didn't work, then that makes both those groups look bad, so there's an inherent social bias against the last two steps to a good training. Ideally, clear metrics will be established in advance of the training initiative and used as a way to measure success. If the training falls short of its goals, don't simply give up. Usually a refresher session or a more narrowly focused training that addresses a particular skills gap will enhance the integrity of the original skill‐building work and make the key learnings stick.

Applying the Six Components to Hybrid Meeting and Collaboration Training

With the six components defined generally, let's help you construct the best plan for training your people to handle a hybrid meeting. Since the six components follow a chronological order, we'll consider each one. Take note that this plan is outlined for organizations in general. You may need to tailor it for your own unique needs.

1. Pretraining environment. For a hybrid meeting and collaboration training, the pretraining environment is going to vary widely based on how hybrid an organization is. Is everyone on a flexible work arrangement, or only certain teams or individual contributors? When that question has been answered, the first thing a training organizer needs to consider is who and how many need the training. Other questions to consider include:
   • Is it likely that the entire enterprise will be engaging in hybrid meetings, or will only certain departments?
   • Do you observe skills gaps that exist from our fully virtual work life, and do those need to be addressed first?
   • Have most been using virtual meetings without much difficulty, or are there still folks who need help figuring that out? You might be surprised by what you learn as you dig into the pre‐training environment.
2. Needs assessment. The needs assessment is all about identifying where the gaps are. For meeting leaders, we need to find out their knowledge concerning meeting facilitation, their use of technology in meetings, their situational awareness levels, and their comfort with leading and directing behavior in meetings. For meeting attendees, we need to find out how much they engage in multitasking in meetings, how willing they are to participate with and without prompting, and how comfortable they are with using the tools provided to them. We recommend this approach: repurpose the checklists in the book and use them as an assessment guide to find out how often people are following best practices. In a large organization, this may be done in the form of a survey. In a smaller organization, a short set of questions relative to these topics could be asked of each individual to get a feel for what the need is.
3. Training design. For this component, the person who will be building the training should use the information gathered in the needs assessment to decide how much breadth and depth is required across the topic areas. For example, let's say we learn that very few people have had facilitation training or even have seen a meeting facilitated by a professional. That means we'd want to spend a good amount of time on facilitation basics, such as how to ensure that everyone participates in a discussion, or how to enable idea generation by both remote and in‐person participants. Design also pertains to how the training will be delivered. Will it be conducted in person, virtual, or hybrid? Will it be in the form of a pre‐recorded webinar with or without live Q&A, or a high‐touch workshop with interaction throughout? Our advice would be to do it hybrid so that you can literally demonstrate the desired behaviors in the training itself. This would allow for role‐playing activities, which takes the training from factual to practical.
4. Training implementation. Now it's time to do the training. Assuming that you've been able to figure out a way to do it live and hybrid, you would want to make sure to emulate as many of the best practices from this book as possible. After all, it's much more impactful when in a training, the instructor can say, “Just as I started this training on time, all of your hybrid meetings should begin on time as well.” And it bears repeating that the training is in fact a meeting, and so be sure to demonstrate effective meeting practices when doing the training. This is particularly important if the training is to be recorded and shared with others, as they will be looking and attending to any errors relevant to effective hybrid collaboration. By doing the training well once, it then could be standardized and shared throughout the organization. No matter what format you land on, we do recommend making it as interactive as possible with plenty of opportunity to answer questions, dive into deeper discussions on certain topics of greater interest, and share real‐world examples among participants.
5. Training transfer. The majority of the training transfer will take place outside of the actual hybrid meeting training itself. We will see it demonstrated in the office or within the meetings we participate in after the training. For example, many organizations are reworking their conference rooms to accommodate hybrid meetings. Training transfer would be observed if we see these rooms being used more for that meeting modality, and if the trend toward hybrid continues. We'd also hope to see better participation in hybrid meetings, with leaders and attendees working together to include everyone in the conversation. The good news is, it won't be hard to find case studies. With the meetingization of our work lives, you will have plenty of opportunities to observe whether the techniques taught are being used with greater frequency in organizations’ own meetings.
6. Training evaluation. The best way to evaluate the success of a training is to refer back to the needs assessment. Have we seen the changes in knowledge, skills, and other characteristics that we hoped to see improve? In addition to that, we recommend targeting each of the four levels we discussed earlier. Find out how participants liked the training. See if they remember the information taught. Have them self‐report on whether they or their peers are doing the expected behaviors. And, perhaps most importantly, find out if their hybrid meetings are just as good as or better than the virtual or face‐to‐face meetings they have been more acquainted with. After all, we are looking to get immediate results, such as good meetings, as well as more distant results, such as sustained employee engagement and overall performance. These latter outcomes require more sustained effort in embracing and using the best practices from the training, both individually as an attendee and also as a leader of hybrid meetings.

To help you begin building the training plan for your organization, we've provided a table of the questions we recommend asking and considering. This is by no means exhaustive, because every organization is different, and therefore, the needs and challenges will be different. But this list will help you get started with the process and hopefully allow you to carry it forward to fruition.

Questions to Consider in Preparing a Hybrid Meeting Training Using the Six Components

Component	Questions to Consider
1. Pretraining environment	How supportive is the organization of remote work and hybrid collaboration? What are the plans/policies related to hybrid or remote work? What is the adoption rate among employees of virtual meeting tools that will be used when hybrid?
2. Needs assessment	What are the skills we want people to have? Do we have a survey tool that we can program to ask about the skills needed for effective hybrid meetings? How long should the survey or list of questions be? Who will compile the results for consideration in designing the appropriate training?
3. Training design	How will the training be delivered? Based on the needs assessment, how deep and broad do you need to go in each of the key topics/skill areas? Who will deliver the training? Can the training be done hybrid, thereby allowing for demonstration and role‐play?
4. Training implementation	When will the training be delivered? How will we incorporate best practices for hybrid meetings into the logistics of the training (i.e. practice what we preach)? What other logistical needs do we need to address prior to the training?
5. Training transfer	Are the newly refurbished conference rooms being used with greater frequency for hybrid meetings? Do we see more of the participation and inclusion behaviors occurring in meetings? Several months after the training, is the software and hardware being used in all the ways trained? Several months after the training, do we still see the best practices for hybrid meetings happening with regularity?
6. Training evaluation	What are the immediate outcomes we want from the training (e.g. more satisfying/effective hybrid meetings)? What are the longer‐term outcomes we want from the training (e.g. increased employee engagement and performance)? To what degree are the learners engaging in the behaviors taught during the training? How sustained are the efforts (i.e. consistent behaviors) made by the learners as they get further from the training?

Training That Scales and Sticks

If you happen to be a learning and development professional in a large organization, you may be struggling with how to scale your training. Not only is there a seemingly endless list of new skills that need to be taught, but also they often need to be taught to a wide swath of the enterprise. With hybrid meeting environments, practically everyone should be at least exposed to best practices for making hybrid meetings effective. The larger challenge might be making sure the training sticks.

“The big thing I worry about is: How do we quality‐control across the masses?” says Kerry Troester, director of North America training and development at Lenovo. For now, she and her team are concentrating on the sales force, which is 900 people strong, helping them continue to hone their video communication and engagement skills. That means ensuring that people look and sound their best whether they are in person or virtual, so the first impression they make is a good one.

“When you are a sales rep, for example, that is how you're retaining your customer or making and closing deals. You have to have a whole higher level of performance,” Kerry continues. “Across the board, we're trying to just upskill everyone and set some standards for how people interact. Every customer interaction makes an impression, and there's a new standard, I think, in how people expect to have a meeting.”

Those expectations are a moving target as we proceed further along the hybrid meeting transition journey, which means that just when your team seems to have mastered one thing, they may need to learn another. All the while, training departments are fighting the gravitational pull of old behaviors. People tend to regress back to what they are used to, what they know, or what they did in the past. Therefore, we have a final recommendation relative to training people for better hybrid meetings: consider creating an abbreviated “booster shot” training. Just as a booster shot for a vaccine resurges the antibodies in the human body, booster shot training reenergizes the learner to keep going, keep doing the good work, and keep flexing those hybrid meeting skills. This training should be brief, hit the high points of the initial training, and help inspire maintaining the good behaviors originally taught. With any training, you are fighting the forgetting curve, the memory model that shows how information we learn fades over time (Ebbinghaus 1885). Without a refresher, the forgetting curve wins. That initial training investment is lost because people will revert back to what worked before – even if what worked before was not the best solution for the current hybrid workforce.

Hybrid meetings are a whole new animal for most organizations, and you may see employees try to opt out of having them and go back to all virtual or all in‐person meetings. However, we believe firmly that if individuals and organizations skill up a bit, the hybrid meeting could be better than all the other modalities. Why? Because it can ensure inclusion. No other form of meetings allows for multimodal participation, which creates more opportunity for people to be able to attend. With hybrid, if the tools are in place, everyone can engage from anywhere they are, regardless of the circumstances. All voices that should be heard can be heard, resulting in a richer meeting where the sum is greater than the parts. Therefore, hybrid meetings that use all the best practices contained in this book have the potential to be both effective and inclusive.

Conclusion

Bringing the tools and training together is the key to a bright hybrid future. When people know what the best practices are for hybrid meetings, then it's in their hands to make them work. Conversely, if they don't even know what to do with those tools or how to use them well, there's no chance for success. Let's ensure that people have the hardware, software, and what we will call “skillware” to be successful in the new hybrid work and meeting environment. Once we do that, we have the potential to avoid the dreaded performance drop‐off, and instead, greatly accelerate people up the learning curve. By doing these things, and those discussed throughout this book, we anticipate seeing a healthy transition to hybrid meetings and collaboration for many individuals and organizations. It is to this healthy transition we now turn in our final chapter.

Chapter Takeaways

• Without training people on how to use the new technology for hybrid meetings, people will likely not use it to best effect, or possibly not use it at all.
• Don't leave people on their own to figure out the new technology. Set up a series of training sessions to help them gain the competence and confidence to use them.
• Training people how to manage their teams and themselves during hybrid meetings is equally as important as training them on the tech itself.
• There are six components of an effective training program:
  1. Pretraining environment
  2. Needs assessment
  3. Training design
  4. Training implementation
  5. Training transfer
  6. Training evaluation
• Create your hybrid meeting training plan by including the six components just listed.
• Don't stop with just one initial training. Design a “booster shot” training to give at a later date to stop bad habits from reappearing.

References

1. Bolino, M. C., T. K. Kelemen, and S. H. Matthews. 2021. “Working 9‐to‐5? A review of research on nonstandard work schedules.” Journal of Organizational Behavior 42 (2): 188–211.
2. Ebbinghaus, H. 1885. Über das gedächtnis: untersuchungen zur experimentellen psychologie. Duncker & Humblot.
3. Epple, D., L. Argote, and R. Devadas. 1991. “Organizational learning curves: A method for investigating intra‐plant transfer of knowledge acquired through learning by doing.” Organization Science 2 (1): 58–70.
4. Kirkpatrick, J., & Kirkpatrick, W. (2009, November). “The Kirkpatrick model: Past, present, and future.” Chief Learning Officer, 8 (11), 20–24.
5. Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP). 2021. An Instructor's Guide for Introducing Industrial‐Organizational Psychology. https://www.siop.org/Events-Education/Educators/I-O-Resources-for-Teachers/I-O-Psychology-Content