Hybrid meeting culture: five steps to reinvent your meetings

Ineffective meetings drain both productivity and wellbeing, and hybrid meetings have made good meetings harder to run. Here are five initiatives to reinvent your meeting culture.

Hybrid meetings have become part of everyday work in most workplaces. They offer flexibility, but they also bring new challenges that make us rethink our meeting culture. In the article 5 good reasons why hybrid meetings HAVE to work, we make the case that hybrid meetings are here to stay, and why they’re a chance to tackle long-standing problems in the way we meet. That leaves the question: how do you improve your hybrid meeting skills and your meeting culture as a whole?

Meetings are a key part of any successful organisation and directly affect efficiency, collaboration and wellbeing. Even so, many organisations struggle with an ineffective meeting culture that holds back productivity and causes frustration. You’re not alone in facing these challenges: across the clients we advise, we see the same problems again and again, whatever the company culture, organisational structure or type of business.

Five steps that strengthen your meeting culture

1. Give your meeting culture a health check

Start by getting a clear picture of what leaders and employees experience today. How often do you meet? Is the purpose clear? Is there always a good agenda, and do you stick to it? Do you finish on time? Also consider whether employees have enough time between meetings for focused work, follow-up and time to recharge. And whether some meetings should be meetings at all, or could be handled more effectively asynchronously.

Employee feedback is valuable, but add factual data points from your collaboration platform, so you get an overall picture. Useful metrics could include:

• Average meeting frequency and length
• How often meetings overrun or start late
• Average time for focus and follow-up
• More advanced measures, such as engagement among people joining from a distance

2. If the meeting culture is going to change, everyone has to be on board

If you really want to improve your meeting culture, it’s crucial to involve everyone in the process. In our experience, feedback from a broad group of employees brings both valuable insight and a far better change process. Read how scalable conversations can give everyone a voice: Employee involvement: top management sees only 4% of the problems.

Based on employees’ input, you can put together a short “best meeting practices” document that everyone can easily find. Point back to it regularly in internal communications, and make sure it clearly reflects the nuances you picked up in the feedback, so people see it as help rather than a set of rules. Topics that are typically included:

• What should a meeting invitation always include (agenda, meeting type, purpose)?
• When is joining online fine, and when is being there in person preferred?
• What are the ground rules for an inclusive meeting experience for everyone?
• When should it be a meeting, and when is asynchronous collaboration better?
• What do good meeting leadership and good participation look like?
• How do we protect time for deep work and breaks between meetings?

3. Use technology to break habits

Even with the best intentions, it’s easy to slip back into bad habits when you’re juggling tasks, emails and meetings. Small adjustments to the tools you use every day can short-circuit those bad habits. Many people, for example, have found it helpful to set up Outlook to book 25- or 50-minute meetings automatically instead of 30 or 60. It creates much-needed breaks between meetings.

Technology can also help build better habits: tools like Meeting Decisions integrate with Outlook and Teams and help you create agendas together, share preparation material, keep to time and follow up on decisions and tasks after the meeting.

4. Make your meeting rooms work again, this time for hybrid

Life at work is too short for dreadful hybrid meetings with poor audio and video. Fortunately, the move to hybrid work has sped up innovation and competition in meeting technology. Ask three test questions about your rooms:

• Can a meeting be started within the first minute of walking into the room?
• Can everyone hear and see clearly, both ways?
• Is it easy to share content?

If not, there are often ways to upgrade your existing equipment that don’t cost a fortune.

5. Invest in (hybrid) meeting skills

Most organisations have already taught employees to share presentations, raise a hand and send emojis in Teams or Google Meet. But the focus needs to be on the core skills that make meetings engaging and effective for both the people in the room and the people at home. Perhaps your next training course should look like this:

• Use technology to support creativity and collaboration
• Plan and prepare meetings so participants want to engage
• Use meetings as an effective leadership tool, for both productivity and wellbeing
• How to write a razor-sharp agenda
• How to ensure better preparation and follow-up
• Facilitation and communication that keep both time and engagement on track

Many providers offer training in meeting skills. What sets our approach apart is that we combine the soft skills with concrete adjustments to the tools you already use. That combination breaks old habits and makes lasting improvements to your meetings more likely.

Want help improving your meeting culture? We cover it in several talks, including Hybrid Leadership 2.0 and our talk on wellbeing. Also read Meeting overload: how to get your focus time back.