Best Practices for Hybrid Meetings

Are you finding yourself in a lot of hybrid meetings lately, where some people are physically present and others are remote, joining using technologies like Zoom or Microsoft Teams? I find them to be the worst of both worlds.

I like a good in-person meeting. When we have time to be physically together, it’s really helpful for connecting. I was also okay with fully virtual meetings. I got used to being in my little Brady Butch square and found a way to make it effective. But I’m still struggling to warm up to hybrid meetings because I find that our experiences are very different depending on whether we’re in the same room or remote.

I’d like to share some techniques I’ve been trying as a team facilitator to make these types of meetings more effective.

Join on Your Own Technology

The first thing I encourage everyone to do is to have everyone in the room join the meeting on their own technology. Even if you have some awesome tech in the meeting room with a camera that can see and follow and zoom in on the speaker. Even when you have that, it usually zooms in on the speaker so that it’s kind of just the side of their face and it’s tiny and you can’t make things out. You can use the room tech for audio, but then you should connect with your tablet, or phone—it doesn’t really, matter as long as you can have the experience and other people can have the experience of you having your own square in the meeting. It makes a really big difference.

The other thing this does is it allows everyone to use the chat feature. I found that chat can really help make meetings more efficient. Things that people couldn’t withhold in a face-to-face meeting can now go into the chat. Someone can just say something like, “We should follow up on X, Y, and Z later.” People see it, but you’re not interrupting the meeting.

Having people who are physically in the room join the meeting on their own technology ensures that everyone has the experience of being a virtual contributor to the conversation, even if they’re physically there.

Turn Your Camera Off

The second technique I’m experimenting with a lot more is in situations where we have the camera off. I know it’s controversial—a lot of managers say, “Turn the camera on!” like it’s a job requirement, but there are a lot of situations where you don’t want to have your camera on.

Yes, it’s better for creating connection when you’re having a contentious discussion and when you’re just in the middle of some kind of interaction or exchange. But there are so many situations and meetings where we’re trying to create a work product, working on a document, looking at a presentation, or trying to take notes on the key pieces of a plan. In any of those situations, it’s really beneficial to turn the cameras off.

It turns out that our human brains just can’t resist trying to figure out what someone’s facial expressions are telling us. We’re using a lot of processing information to deal with that when we should be trying to focus our attention on some kind of work output. We’re much better when the cameras are off.

When you go into a meeting where you’re working on a product, try to turn off the cameras. Then, when you pull out to have a conversation, that’s your cue to switch them back on. It’s really about getting to the point where you’re toggling camera on, camera off, depending on what you’re working on.

Have Fewer Meetings

And here’s my third tip—one of the best tips for hybrid meetings: don’t have a meeting! There are so many situations where we use hybrid meetings to inform, report, or monitor all kinds of things, or even to approve those kinds of activities, and they really don’t need a meeting. We know from Microsoft’s research that over the course of the pandemic, the number of hours people spent in meetings has increased by 250%. The average person now spends 22 hours a week in meetings! That’s not productive and it’s not healthy. We really want to reduce the number of hours spent in meetings. One of the ways to do that is to get rid of a bunch of the hybrid meetings that you have on your calendar and get that task done in a different way.

It’s really great to have meetings when your team has an anchor day where you’re all physically together in the office. What are the novel, complex, controversial topics that you can cover? What are the cross-team, cross-functional groups that you need to bring together? Where can you anticipate, envision, and design? All of those things are going to be done much better in-person than in a hybrid meeting. So, move those things to when you’re together.

Other things, where you’re just checking off a list or making sure you’ve got all the steps in the plan, don’t need a meeting at all. Maybe what you want to do is have somebody do a screen recording or a quick video and say, “Here’s what I’ve got, I’m sending this out so you can listen to it whenever it’s convenient for you. Let me know if I’ve missed any steps.” See? You don’t need a meeting at all—and that video might even be as little as seven minutes long. If it had been a meeting, it would have filled up 30 minutes, maybe an hour.

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So, those are my tips to make your hybrid meetings better. Have everyone join with technology, spend a lot more time with the camera off, and move hybrid meetings into other formats as often as possible. These are the things that are working for the teams that I’m facilitating. I hope they’ll work for your team too.