hybrid meetings Archives

In a new mini-series of blogs, we take a light-hearted look at different types of employees, their personas and how the transition to hybrid might affect them, and more importantly what you can do to keep them happy.

First up, one of the key remote working employee personas: it’s the Soloist. Most famous example: Albert Einstein.

The Soloist is an independent creature, a lone worker happiest working from their garden office in sweatpants; mandatory remote working has been a paradise for them. No commute, flexibility and the freedom to pop into the kitchen every few hours to mix their sourdough starter. They like to get their head down away from the distractions and noise of the office. They’re typically older and more established at the company – unlike their more junior colleagues, they don’t feel the need to network and nurture relationships.

Einstein, perhaps the world’s most decorated Soloist, famously wore the same outfit every day so that he didn’t waste precious brainpower on deciding what to wear. For the Soloist, dressing up for the office is an unnecessary extravagance.

Soloists are typically highly productive. They’re happiest in a hands-off culture that allows them to dictate their own working patterns. They thrive when they’re judged on the quality of their output rather than time spent at their desk. Autonomy and choice are important to them. The challenge for organizations is ensuring that the Soloist remains engaged with company culture and doesn’t become isolated. Particularly over the medium to long term, as culture evolves and employees come and go, the Soloist may find themselves losing touch with the workplace community.

Here are ten tips to help you keep your Soloists feeling happy, engaged and valued in a hybrid workplace culture.

1. Keep your lone worker connected with workplace technology

Communication and project management platforms such as Slack and Asana help keep communication lines open no matter where employees are based. Easier for quick-fire conversations than email, they’re the virtual equivalent of informal office chats. You can use them for both work and play too. Social Slack channels help recreate those watercooler moments, facilitate connection and encourage Soloists out of their home office silos. Insist that all employees use your chosen platforms even if they spend time in the office, so you don’t leave anybody out of updates and conversations.

2. Practice hybrid meeting equality

Team members who attend meetings in person will typically benefit from a richer experience, picking up on the social cues and non-verbal communication so important to human interaction.

The Soloist, staring at a laptop screen, will potentially miss out. Try to mitigate against this by making an extra effort to ensure that these lone workers feel included and valued in your meetings, whether in-person or remote. Our hybrid meetings article is full of tips, including making time for small talk at the beginning, giving everybody a chance to contribute on each point and implementing tech that creates an immersive meeting experience for remote attendees. Acknowledge screen fatigue too, and only schedule meetings when necessary.

3. Keep lone workers in the loop

The Soloist can get FOMO too. Nobody likes the feeling that they’re the last to hear big news. It’s important to make sure they’re kept in the loop of any changes at work. Make any big announcements over a virtual call so that everyone gets to hear them at the same time and through the same medium. Make sure that remote employees have the same opportunity to respond and feedback as everybody else.

4. Show them you care

If you have a Soloist in your team, there’s a risk that conversations with them become purely mechanical – project updates, task setting or performance reviews. Those serendipitous encounters in the corridor or after work drinks when you chat about personal things – holidays, your families, or the Super Bowl – don’t happen.

Be sure to make room for personal connection in your interactions with Soloists. Show an interest in their private lives. Get to know what’s going on for them. If conversations easily get bogged down in work topics, why not schedule a fortnightly check-in call with day-to-day work strictly off the agenda?

5. Celebrate their contributions

Feeling undervalued can lead to resentment. At home for most of the time, the Soloist isn’t around to get that pat on the back or appreciative nod during a meeting. Left unchecked, they can start to feel underappreciated. Celebrating contributions can be as simple as publicly saying thank you for a piece of work or achievement during a team call, or making a point of acknowledging individual contributions when sharing a project update.

6. Offer flexible working

One of the biggest benefits the Soloist enjoys is the flexibility to fit work around life. Provided they’re performing, afford them the autonomy to choose when they work and embrace asynchronous communication. We all have times of the day when we’re more productive, and it’s not always between nine and five.

7. Be clear on in-person meeting cadence

If you require staff to come into the office for face-to-face meetings, be clear on what you expect. Short-notice requests to come in might be a problem for Soloists, so communicate dates and times clearly and in good time – finding a routine with a regular cadence will work best.

8. Bring the office to them

Companies such as Fujitsu are setting up hub and spoke models, with a slimmed down HQ and satellite offices in urban areas or close to train stations. These satellites give workers an easy option when they need or want to meet in-person. They break down one of the barriers Soloists may have to coming in – difficulty getting to the office.

9. Seamless in-office experience

Creating a great in-office experience will make your Soloists’ trips into the office as pain-free as possible. One of the biggest sources of anxiety for remote workers coming into the office is hot desk anxiety. You can eliminate this by enabling your employees to book a desk in advance, either as a one-off or on a regular cadence.

They’ll get peace of mind that there’s a clean desk waiting for them in a location they know they can work in. Desk scheduling software systems such as Kadence also give organizations a wealth of usage data, so you can design workplaces using data-driven usage insights.

10. Ensure equipment parity

From a lumbar support chair to an ergonomic keyboard, providing Soloists with a good level of equipment for their home office will help them feel valued, and support their wellbeing. In a remote-first culture, many companies will be moving to a desk hoteling system and repurposing office space for collaboration and meeting space. If you’re in that boat, why not offer surplus desk equipment to home workers so they can upgrade their spare room or garden shed for work?

The Soloist employee persona – made for the remote-first hybrid workplace

After decades of a one-size-fits-all approach, the workplace as we know it is in flux. There’s no doubt those who prefer lone working are well suited to this hybrid workplace revolution. If they’ve struggled with coming into the office on a fixed routine in the past, the sudden new-found freedom will have been a breath of fresh air.

So don’t try to force your Soloists back to the office unnecessarily. Instead, embrace their independence and put in place a hybrid working model and remote working tools and strategies to keep them connected and engaged from afar.

Long live the meeting room. At a time when remote working has become the norm and organizations are transitioning to a hybrid workplace, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the humble meeting room’s days are numbered. Not so. As workplaces evolve and teams are spread across different locations, hybrid meetings are a way to ensure collaboration and decision-making doesn’t grind to a halt.

They do, however, bring their own unique set of challenges. How do you, for example, ensure that virtual attendees at a hybrid meeting aren’t disadvantaged and left to feel like second class citizens?

Let’s take a look at what a hybrid meeting is and how you can run them as effectively as possible.

What is a hybrid meeting?

A hybrid meeting involves a mixture of in-person and remote attendees. Remote attendees join the meeting via a virtual meeting platform, such as Microsoft Teams or Zoom. In-person attendees sit together in a dedicated meeting room. Sometimes each participant will take part in the meeting using a personal device, regardless of whether they’re physically in the meeting room or not. In other instances, in-person attendees will use a central screen.

Hybrid meetings can help oil the wheels of teamwork, collaboration and decision-making in your organization, because you don’t need to interrupt meeting cadence even if some employees aren’t in the office.

In the post-Covid office, health and safety is higher up the agenda than before. Hybrid meetings are the perfect way to minimize the number of people physically present in a space. Social distancing isn’t a problem, because you can limit the number of people in the meeting room.

With a meeting room booking system, you can ensure rooms don’t get oversubscribed, have an oversight of who’s using each meeting room and get a long-range view of future bookings. The system also provides touchless check-in via an app that integrates with touchless door entry – minimizing contact with surfaces in the office.

Hybrid meetings are time-efficient and good for the planet too. Traveling into the office for one meeting is time consuming and creates unnecessary journeys. Hybrid meetings that give employees the option of remaining at home eliminate that commute time and reduce carbon footprint.

Combined space: Connecting face-to-face teams with remote employees

To make the most of hybrid meetings, you may need to make some upgrades to your meeting spaces and the way you manage them. The modern meeting room will rely on technology more than a traditional meeting space. Sound, video and connectivity are all important.

In terms of sound, ceiling- or desk-mounted microphones that aren’t sensitive to background noise, and that can distinguish who is speaking, will ensure remote attendees don’t miss out on conversation.

For remote attendees, a laptop will typically be their window into the meeting room. In-person attendees will either use a tabletop screen that combines video and audio, or a central video conference screen. Each person in the meeting should feel like they have equal opportunity to engage with the discussion and contribute their ideas. Your technology will need to accommodate screen sharing so that every attendee can see the meeting content and contribute to a virtual whiteboard or equivalent.

Meeting room scheduling

In-room technology is only half the picture; meeting room scheduling software also plays a central role.

In a hybrid workplace, people aren’t in the office Monday to Friday, nine to five. There’s less opportunity for impromptu office chats, so you need to be more disciplined in meeting scheduling. Optimizing meeting room configuration is also important because you’re more reliant on meeting spaces working well.

A meeting room booking system allows your employees to plan their hybrid meeting schedule in advance. It will also give office managers and space planners the power to manage meeting spaces, coordinate cleaning schedules, avoid overcrowding and identify pinch points in demand.

The usage data a meeting room booking system gives you will show you whether you’ve got enough meeting spaces in your workplace, and whether they’re the right size and spec for the people using them. The requirement to check in means you’ll also be able to see where rooms are booked but not used. You can release unused spaces back into the availability pool, eliminating the problem of reserved but unused rooms.

Smart room booking systems include extra features that enhance the employees’ experience, such as auto-syncing with Microsoft and Google calendars, and suggesting the most appropriate spaces and amenities for a meeting based on requirements.

How do you run an inclusive hybrid meeting?

Hybrid meetings can present a unique set of challenges. We’ve all been in meetings that get dominated by one voice. One opinion prevails, other attendees disengage, and the organization as a whole suffers. In a hybrid meeting, remote attendees can feel left out, and it’s harder to pick up social cues when you’re sitting in front of a laptop screen.

The hands-on elements of a meeting can exclude remote attendees too. Writing ideas on Post-it notes or sharing a plate of cookies around the room can unwittingly create a sense of inequality. And finally, surprising to nobody, tech issues can kill a meeting before it’s even started – and it’s usually the remote attendees who will suffer.

So here are five tips to help you run hybrid meetings that work for everybody, whether they’re sitting at their kitchen table or in your office’s AV equipped modern meeting room.

1. Asynchronous communication can mean a meeting isn’t always the answer

First off, consider whether a meeting is the best way to fulfil your communication needs.

When offices shifted to remote working in 2020, many of us were tempted to stack up meetings to ensure communication lines between colleagues stayed open. As we’ve got better at remote work, smart organizations have realized that many of those meetings aren’t required.

Communication tools such as Slack mean co-workers can communicate with each other easily and move things on without holding a meeting. Asynchronous communication means an immediate reply isn’t expected in the discussion, so you can accommodate different working patterns and locations without hampering progress.

2. Plan your hybrid meetings carefully

Cutting back on the number of meetings means you can carefully plan the ones you do have. In a hybrid culture, people come into the office for a specific reason. Carefully planned meetings will ensure they can make the most of that time.

Next time you’re tempted to quickly pencil in a hybrid meeting in colleagues’ calendars, pause and take a few moments to think about:

The purpose of the meeting
The decisions you need to take
Any pre-reading you can send attendees
Which meeting room you will use, and whether it has the tech to accommodate remote attendees

That way you can make the preparations you need to ensure the meeting is productive and inclusive.

3. Consider meeting timings

As we know by now, video calls are tiring. They’re tough on the eyes, it can be hard to focus and we don’t benefit from physical interaction with other human beings.

Make sure you take all this into account when you’re planning your hybrid meetings. Try not to make them too long and schedule breaks where remote attendees can switch their screens off and get away from their laptops.

Also, be strict on meeting start time. If a meeting is late to start, in-person attendees can chat outside the room or go and grab a coffee. A remote attendee just gets to see their own face staring back at them as they wait for the host to press go.

4. Structure contributions from meeting attendees

To avoid remote attendees getting ignored, be more structured in the way you invite contributions. This can be as simple as taking the time to ask every attendee directly if they’ve got anything to add at the end of each agenda item.

5. Get everyone to use the same technology

So that the meeting doesn’t become disjointed, ask that everyone uses the available technology regardless of whether they’re in-person or remote.

For example, if you’re using a virtual Post-it note platform such as Miro, make sure everybody uses it. Try to avoid a situation where half of the attendees are scribbling on a whiteboard in the meeting room and the other half are using the virtual platform.

A final thought on the future of meetings

The meeting is a staple of office life. It plays a key role in decision making and collaboration, and its place in our workplace culture is secure. But as circumstances force the workplace to evolve, the way we approach meetings must adapt too.

Inclusivity is key, as is the right technology to support a modern meeting room. AV equipment, virtual communication tools and meeting room booking software all have an important role to play in ensuring that meetings remain effective business tools, and that they’re enjoyable, engaging and inclusive.

Tag: hybrid meetings

Hybrid Persona #1: The Soloist