Need to meet yet some people are virtual, others gathered in hubs?
Need workplace and home tech to work together for level playing field?
Want to use conference rooms too?
Here, red10‘s Will Sudworth shares 3 top tips for having great hybrid meetings.
Basecamp
If you find this article useful, have you seen our Free Kit for Virtual Meetings ?
This article is one of the Bag of Tools in our 3Bs Virtual Kit – Basecamp, Behaviours and Bag of Tools to help leaders facilitate great virtual meetings. There are advanced tools that you may be interested in too, such as Breakout Rooms and Annotations for prioritizing
What is a hybrid meeting?
A hybrid meeting is when you DO NOT have either:
- Everyone in-person
- Everyone joining virtually whilst working from home
Rather, you have some people in-person together in the same conference room on-site AND some people joining whilst working from home.
Why would you do hybrid?
- It’s a joy to bring even just a few people together, physically
- The meeting feels like a special offsite, rather than just yet another operational gathering
- It enables the LT be role models at encouraging staff back onto the premises
Top Tip #1 Use a tech set-up that allows everyone to access the meeting EQUALLY
Teams work best when there’s a level playing field, and it is especially important to have good meeting hygiene in hybrid meetings to ensure psychological safety.
Here’s our suggested tech set-up to enable this:
Working from home?
- Access the meeting as normal, using your laptop and platform of choice, e.g. MS Teams, WebEx, Zoom
Working from a conference room?
- Ask each person in the conference room to bring their laptop and use it to connect
SO THAT they can still each access the Chatbox and use the virtual tools - Ask each laptop user to mute their audio AND mute their microphone
SO THAT they can use the conference room audio - Ask each laptop user to switch their laptop video on AS WELL as using the conference video
SO THAT everyone sees each other close up in the same way, treating everyone equally
Top Tip #2 Take advantage of both the physical clusters AND virtual clusters
It might still be possible, and a good thing, to create breakouts that work regardless of location.
Yet, people really appreciate being able to breakout with those in the same room as them.
Our preference is to create breakouts of people in the same conference room, together with one or more breakouts of those who are working from home.
Breakout in a Conference Room?
- Go old-style – use a whiteboard, and sticky notes, take a photo at the end so that you can share back with the full team
Breakout in a Virtual Room?
- Use the advanced tools like Zoom Annotate or Virtual Sticky Notes and then share it back with the full team
Advanced Top Tip #3 Two screens are better than one
Chances are that you have discovered how useful two or more screens are, whilst working from home.
How about finding a way to still have two screens, even when back in a conference room with your laptop?
One solution is to connect your iPad to your laptop, and use the laptop as your second monitor, using the iPad app Duet.
Any other top tips for hybrid meetings?
Please let us know in the comments here…