Employees have been complaining about painful and pointless meetings for decades. Now that most of us are engaging in hybrid virtual meetings (where some people gather in a conference room and others join in remotely), those complaints are multiplying and growing louder. Why?
- It’s so easy to invite people from across the company into a hybrid meeting, and as a result, we’re getting called into a lot more meetings.
- In a hybrid meeting, you can get all the technical snafus of remote meetings, all the inefficiencies of in-person meetings, and a special dose of awkwardness that’s unique to the hybrid setup.
We can continue to whine and joke around about how horrible hybrid meetings are—or, we can do something about it. To learn what that “something” might be, I talked to Iris Mansour, hybrid meetings expert and founder of communication training firm Every Epic. She identified four things every meeting organizer must know before sending out an invite.
1: The Bullseye (the anticipated outcome from the meeting)
What decision needs to be made? What feedback needs to be secured? This should be clearly articulated in advance (i.e., in an agenda) and reiterated at the outset of the meeting. Note that if your “bullseye” is an announcement, you should reconsider whether a meeting is truly necessary.
2: The Stakes (how the meeting ties to big-picture goals).
How does what we’re talking about in this meeting help us advance our team- or organization-wide goals? It’s important to be specific here, as this can help you reign in off-track and out-of-scope discussions without hurting people’s feelings. For example, “That’s a great point, and we should circle back to that for Q3 planning. But today, we’re talking about our Q2 plans.”
3: The Rules of Engagement (expectations for how people will participate).
Are participants supposed to keep their cameras on? Is anyone monitoring the chat feature? Should people ask questions and offer feedback as they think of it, or hold it to the end? If you don’t want to experience chaos or awkward silences, you’ll need to be extremely clear about how people are supposed to participate. As with the first two points, this should be explained in advance and at the outset of the meeting.
4: The Cues (the ways in which participants show they’re becoming disengaged or distracted).
There are two important things to keep in mind about cues:
- They’re not generalizable. One employee typing away during a meeting might be taking notes, while another might be chatting with friends on Facebook or multitasking on a different project.
- They don’t necessarily indicate “bad” behavior. In fact, when participants display these cues, it’s usually the organizer’s fault for not having clarified the purpose of the meeting. Or the organizer called the wrong people into the meeting. Or they droned on for too long. Or they let others drone on for too long…you get the idea. People show they’re bored when the meeting is boring.
It's not always easy, but managers must take responsibility for understanding their teams well enough to recognize their cues. As Mansour said, “Meeting IQ is leadership IQ, and that means reading the room—whether it’s a conference room, a Zoom room, or both.”
Only You Can Prevent Bad Hybrid Meetings
Much of the responsibility for making hybrid meetings more effective falls on meeting organizers, but there’s a lot that we can all do make hybrid office communication and collaboration better. For more insights, see:
• How to Enable Communication and Collaboration in a Hybrid Workplace (article)
• Surviving the Hybrid Office with Iris Mansour and Lauren Trees (podcast)
• Effective Hybrid Office Communication with Iris Mansour and Lauren Trees (podcast)
• Virtual Collaboration: Rules of the Road (collection)