11 Top Tips for Hybrid Meetings
As we begin to realise the implication of flexible working, it becomes more and more important to run effective and inclusive meetings. Make sure to hit the ground running with our top tips for hybrid meetings!
I’ve been running training and consulting with organisations about running hybrid meetings since 2020. This builds on my passion for helping organisations run decent, engaging, purposeful meetings, which has been a focus of my organisational consultancy since 2007.
In January 2022, I founded PlacesWork to support individuals and organisations like you with the transformation to hybrid meetings through the delivery of practical and concise training, consultancy and coaching worldwide.
In our courses and webinars, we often get asked what our 10 top tips for hybrid meetings are. So, here we go!
Our 11 Top Tips for Hybrid Meetings
1) Plan the meeting.
For a meeting to be really effective, you need to have the right people there with the right things, the right coffee, the right amount of time and that requires planning about who, what and how? This tip has been true for all meetings, yet for hybrid meetings, the need to plan is paramount.
2) Make it engaging and fun.
Organisations need to be alive, like our brains need to be alive. We need to build the connections between people, preferably via respecting their interests and thinking about what will connect them what questions will help their brains come alive, what discussions are really needed, what motivations do we need to use to connect the future?
In hybrid meetings, the engagement methods need to work for both sides of the screen. For example if your going to have a brainstorming/popcorning free thinking part of the meeting, where in the old days you would have written peoples words onto a flipchart while everyone speaks, in hybrid environments you can do that via using a Mentimetre wordcloud, or post it notes in JamBoard while people do some talking.
3) Be Clear About your goals.
Consider your vision and set your intention based on that vision in order to lead and inspire and facilitate. At PlacesWork, we recommend an overall task based outcome, as well as setting an experiential based outcome. The latter would be about naming how you want participants to feel, behave, grow.
This depicts the meetings of the present and future. Pod Based Meetings I call them.
4) Focus on your timings.
Focus on the order of interactions that will achieve the outcomes you need by the time the meeting ends. If it's to be a relaxed meeting, call it that - but don't overrun or run late without permission because you might need them to come on board for next time.
5) Get everyone to talk At the start.
This is one of our favourite top tips for hybrid meetings: At the beginning, make sure that everyone gets to chat with everybody. And then do it again near the end. This creates a sense of connection for all attendees. There’s a reason why audio quality for everyone is one of the main factors leading to poor quality in hybrid meetings.
6) Consider preparation time.
If the purpose of your meeting is heavy and requires a lot of preparation time, consider the amount of time and effort that they have to prepare for the meeting. Perhaps you can build some of this into the meeting by getting them to pair up at the beginning to go over their pre-reading. At, especially for hybrid meetings, give everyone the cushion time to get their wifi log in sorted and get their right shared documents, Jamboards or such logged in.
One thing you can do to help with effective hybrid meetings is to give everyone the opportunity to have some training on hybrid meetings. Check out our Introduction course which gives a great, practical overview of all whitings hybrid meetings.
7) use smaller groups to change the energy.
For every meeting, the experiential outcome is definitely ‘connection’, for many meetings the outcomes include collaboration, consultation, diversity of thinking or even consensual decision making. If you are expecting these latter outcomes, then our top tip for hybrid meetings is to use smaller groups alongside the plenary group spaces. Read this case study or this case study to find out more.
8) Change it up.
One of our top tips for hybrid meetings is to change the energy of the meeting every 20 minutes or so. Go back over the meeting plan and think what you can do to maintain a sense of what we are going to be working on next, how we're going to report back or how the thing progresses.
9) Review at the end.
Another one of our top tips for hybrid meetings is to do a closing sequence at the end of the meeting. Ask everybody how it went, what worked for them and what could be improved next time.
10) Team Up and scale up.
Especially in the beginning, it’s great to have a collaborator in the meeting. For example, share your plan, share your F.A.I.L. s (First. Attempts. In. Learning.) and get suggestions. For hybrid meetings, at PlacesWork we always have one of us in the IRL (In Real Life) room, and the other associate is facilitating via remote connection. That way we see, feel and facilitate the experience from both sides of the hybrid and can intervene to improve how it works for both sides.
One of the experts I interviewed recently for our PlacesWork online courses said: “Duncan, I am finding that many organisations are culturally ready for hybrid meetings, they just don’t know how to do it very well yet. But there are those who are not even culturally there, and some of those are treating their workforce as though nothing has changed from the pandemic.”
Check out the maturity scale and asses how ready you are for hybrid meetings:
11) Rinse and repeat.
When it comes to our top tips for hybrid meetings, the truth is that we should really call these meetings ‘Blended meetings’. Think about it, they require a blend of what was good about meetings in the old days with what is good about virtual meetings. This blend, like all good blends in life (whisky, coffee, soups), needs a level of intentionality involved. So, our last tip is… Don’t just stumble around without learning.
There are a few underpinning points for why these are our top tips… although you can read much more in our Toolkit for Setting up and Running Hybrid Meetings, or you can come on any of our workshops at PlacesWork, or read any of the connecting articles.
In brief -
We are a HUMAN species.
We are a global species.
We have 5 senses.. and when we use them well this gives us our 6th sense too.
We have 18 types of intelligences…
Given how much we should want to harness all those sources of intelligence, then in the virtual only world, we deny ourselves all sorts of creative intelligent resources.
Hybrid is here and it is much more than hybrid working patterns…
At the company efficient level, it is about how we harness all this in our meetings.
In fact, imagine these are in different time zones, with multi languages too. Yep then you would plan well if your the facilitator. Welcome to our current world… its all happening…
The key question for your business/organisation is where are you in this changing practice?
In our recent workshops we have been asking companies around the world to rate where they are in this emerging practice of hybrid meetings. We do this on a maturity scale, where they rate their company at 1 if they are just beginning to think about hybrid meetings, or 3 if they have started applying the principles to some meetings and are getting to grips with it.
As you can see in the diagram at April 2022, no companies are rating them at mastery level.
Yet how many times have you been to a meeting where the level and types of participation have led to a poor experience.
How many times have you felt excluded when your a remote participant to a physical meeting room?
How many times have you felt that the ‘remote’ folk or the ‘roomies’ were operating as if they were not in one meeting space?
How many times have you heard this blamed on the technology?
In our Practical Guidance and our training courses we are helping meeting organisers solve these issues and become more confident and fluent in setting up and running hybrid meeting environments.
Updated Nov23 by Duncan Wallace