Beating the Hybrid Meeting Headaches
By Paul Dumansky, Proposal and Strategic Content Manager, Crowell & MoringAt the onset of the pandemic, many legal marketers hoped that one positive side effect would be cutting back on the excessive number of meetings. Instead, we learned how to become uber-proficient at holding virtual meetings via Zoom, Teams, and a variety of other platforms most of us had scarcely heard of prior to March 2020 … and the countless meetings endured.
As we now proceed through the “limbo” period where we have largely-but-not-fully emerged from the pandemic, we are faced with a new challenge: organizing productive meetings that involve participants both in conference rooms and remotely.
This added layer of complexity means that not only do we face the usual challenges associated with meetings of making sure that the right colleagues and lawyers are invited and that it is a good use of everyone’s time, but also that all parties are full participants in the meeting, and that we can assuage both technology issues and the complicated social dynamics that emerge when groups of people are trying to communicate in a hybrid meeting environment.
Need some tips for making these hybrid meetings as productive as possible? Glad you asked:
• Assess the Tech. The dreaded lag and the repeated “No, I’m sorry … you go ahead,” the distraction of hearing your voice reverberate in a conference room while you speak on video, the inability to hear people in the conference room because they are 40 feet from the nearest microphone. From experience, you know by now which are the most significant challenges to your hybrid meetings. Use this knowledge to address all of these issues upfront. Collaborate with your firm’s tech department to set up the conference room to resolve sound issues, have people utilize the chat feature in lieu of trying to interject verbally and causing the meeting to have awkward stops and starts, and mute the conference room microphone(s) when people on video are speaking. The challenges with your team may differ, but if you set up tech “ground rules” in advance, your hybrid meetings can go off with limited hitches.
• Minority Rule. The default when deciding who will run a meeting is to pick the senior person on the totem pole: the practice group leader, the most experienced partner, the CMO. But whenever possible in hybrid meetings, those whose voices are least likely to be heard should be leading the meeting. If you have 20 people in a conference room and five people at home on Zoom, those on Zoom are the most likely to be left out. Shift this power dynamic by having one of the Zoom attendees lead the meeting, as that person is more likely to make sure fellow “Zoomers” feel included, while those in the conference room will still have a great deal of input simply by virtue of numbers.
• Agenda Adherence. Improvisation has its place, but hybrid meetings are not that place. The more you jump around the more the meeting will lack flow, and eventually one group of people—most likely those on video but also possibly those in the conference room—will tune out. Stay on task, and do not get involved in tangential discussions exclusively with your colleagues in the physical or virtual room.
• An Arthurian Room Setup. In the “before times,” people in conference rooms tended to break into clusters: senior partners in one corner, associates in another, marketing coordinators huddled together, etc. In this new age, people tend to get as far away from each other as possible, which hey, at least has broken down perceived status barriers. What is important though is to make sure that those in a conference room are positioned in a way where everyone in the room AND on screen feel as if they are part of the group. As outlined in Forbes’
“Four Tips for Successful Hybrid Meetings,” try to rearrange the room so that everyone physically present is in a circle and facing the video screen so that, “all the participants are in a circle and people feel more included.” Like the Knights of the Round Table, this communicates without the need for words that everyone in the meeting is of equal importance.
• Only When Necessary. While not even a global pandemic could keep us from having the occasionally superfluous meeting, the extra effort required to hold a hybrid meeting means you should be especially sure it is necessary before you schedule one. Enough said.
For more tips, feel free to check out the aforementioned Forbes article, as well as Fast Company’s “
9 Tips and Tools for Effectively Managing Your Hybrid Meetings” and “
Considerations and Best Practices for Running Hybrid Meetings” from the i4cp Productivity Blog. And have a good meeting!