5 good reasons why hybrid meetings HAVE to work

Should we drop the hybrid meeting when we can’t get everyone into the same room? No. Here are five reasons why hybrid meetings have to work in a flexible workplace.

Every so often you come across the argument that we should give up on the hybrid meeting: if not everyone can be in the same room, everyone should join separately from their own screen instead. It may sound appealing in theory, but in the real world of flexible work, the reasons to build hybrid meeting skills are overwhelming.

Most of us have been there: joining a hybrid meeting from somewhere else while the others sit together in a meeting room. It can be a dreadful experience. Sound you can’t make out, people in the room talking over each other, the small audio delay that makes it hard to get a word in, or the chair who forgets the people at home. When you’re in the room yourself, it’s easy to forget the colleagues who aren’t, even with the best intentions.

We all have a proximity bias: we instinctively pay most attention to the people physically close to us, and favour them. So a well-known strategy is “Virtual First”: everyone joins online, which levels the playing field and makes the experience the same for all. As one participant sarcastically put it during a client workshop: “It’s perfect, it just makes it a crap experience for everyone.” We wouldn’t put it that way ourselves, but there’s a lot of truth in the comment: purely virtual meetings can be dreadful too.

So why do we have to make hybrid meetings work?

1. We need to take every chance to look away from the screen. In a flexible setting we depend heavily on digital tools, and at the same time work-related stress is rising. Back-to-back video meetings and constant notifications make us switch context, lose focus and forget our breaks. Technostress and infobesity are growing problems, and paying attention to tech/life balance is part of the answer.
2. We need to strengthen culture, relationships and collaboration across the organisation. At a distance we pay more attention to the task and less to relationships, the glue that holds an organisation together. One effective way to strengthen those ties is quality time together at the office. Not scattered across an open-plan office with a headset and a laptop.
3. We need to make office time worth the commute. We often hear clients complain: “I’m in virtual meetings all day” or “when I go into the office, my colleagues aren’t there”. In Microsoft’s 2022 Work Trend Index, 38% said they didn’t know when and why they should go into the office. If you commute 45 minutes to sit in video meetings, you’d be right to start asking why. Time in the office should reinforce what we enjoy most about being there: human contact.
4. We’ll need hybrid meeting skills anyway. Some meetings work best when everyone is together, and shared guidelines for meeting types are good practice. But if a colleague is at home with a sick child or stuck at a client’s: will you cancel the meeting? Or ask the nine other participants, who’ve just flown in, to go back to separate desks? Hardly. That person joins online, the meeting becomes hybrid, and then it has to work.
5. Meetings were never perfect before. We like to glorify the past, but let’s be honest: in a 2017 survey, 65% of managers said meetings kept them from getting their own work done, and 71% found meetings unproductive. Hybrid working just makes us more aware of the problems, and gives us a reason to make meetings markedly better, with more structure and smarter collaboration.

Microsoft has measured a 252% increase in time spent in Teams meetings for the average user since 2020. No wonder many people feel tired and overwhelmed. It’s time to rethink meetings and fix our meeting culture as a whole. And while we’re reinventing it, let’s build hybrid skills in from the start.

So how do you go about it? We’ve gathered what we’ve learned here: Hybrid meeting culture: five steps to reinvent your meetings. And if your meeting chairs need a boost, read Hybrid meeting leadership: the chair has to act as a TV host.

Want help building a better (hybrid) meeting culture? We give talks, run workshops and advise. See the talk Hybrid Leadership 2.0, or get in touch.