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How to collaborate with your hybrid team

Let’s take a quick look back into time at a project team meeting, say around February 2020. Imagine the pre-pandemic meeting conference room table and the Polycom in the center. The project team saunters in, picks their seats, makes small talk until the last person enters the room and closes the door behind them. The meeting leader starts to walk through the agenda when someone says, “we forgot to dial-in.”

Contributed by Michael Goldrich, global head of digital marketing, Club Quarters Hotels, Stamford, Connecticut

The meeting would pause, someone would look through their notes to try to find the dial-in number, when it’s found, the pressing of the loud phone buttons reverberates throughout the room. Invariably the passcode would be entered wrong because the person enters the guest code versus the host code. After another brief pause to find the host code, it’s now about 10 minutes into the meeting.

The remote associates wouldn’t be dialed in because they dropped off because they thought the meeting team forgot about them, which is true. They dial back in and we continue through the agenda and projecting slides up on the screen. The remote worker would say they couldn’t see what was being presented. Someone would email them the deck and we would pause and describe the slide number or slide title to keep them aligned with where we were.

As the meeting progresses, we would call out to the remote team members for input. We would have to call out several times to remind them if they are talking that they are on mute. They would unmute provide an update and the meeting would progress until it ended. This was pretty typical of how the remote workers were treated. Essentially, they were second class citizens when it came to meetings. It really is no wonder why most managers avoided allowing workers to be remote. There was just too much disconnect.

Fast forward to the pandemic and now everyone is remote and the status of the remote worker became the de facto standard. Now meetings are scheduled not via conference room but by Zoom/Teams/Meet and the second step of dialing and then redialing in the meeting conference number is replaced by easily clicking a link. Pre-pandemic, when there was a video call, around 80% of the participants would have the camera off, now it is considered rude not to be on camera.

With the pandemic waning, and as we begin to trickle back to the office and commence to have meetings in-person again in the conference rooms, the Polycom which used to be the great connector will now seem anachronistic. How will we handle the meetings when we can safely assume at least half of the team will be remote? How can we manage and maintain the same level of interaction and engagement when half the team is in the room and the other half is at home sitting in front of their computers? How can we make sure meetings are seamless and efficient meetings, with both physical and virtual participation?

I’ve thought about this and I think one way to handle this is via a hybrid approach until offices redesign their conference rooms into specially crafted Zoom or Teams meeting rooms. These new types of meeting rooms will be designed to display remote workers up on a screen on the wall and have cameras below the screens pointing at the people in the meeting to create a sense of a presence of the remote workers.

Barring the existence of these futuristic rooms for most companies, I think the only way to truly do it is to have everyone bring their laptop into the meeting room (which was always a shunned practice because when workers did that, they typically did work unrelated to the meeting) and have them logged onto the Zoom or Teams meeting with their laptop camera on, but the microphone needs to be muted and the speaker volume turned off to prevent feedback interference. Then it is a matter of mastering the skill the teachers had to develop during the pandemic with their students when half their class was remote. Office workers will need to learn how to address those in person and those remote equally by talking to the people in the room and then looking down at their laptop camera.

There are huge advantages to the new hybrid meeting of the post-COVID pandemic. It removes the manual dialing of the Polycom. The remote worker will no longer be forgotten during in-person meetings. It allows easier presentation of documents both on the projector screen and those following along at home. It will treat remote workers equally when it comes to meetings.

Apart from knowing where to look, one of the most difficult points of engagement will be sound. What I think will work best is essentially having a smartphone logged into the meeting with camera off but with the microphone on and the speaker and sound turned all the way up. The phone can be placed where the Polycom usually sits in the middle of the table. This phone can also be passed around, essentially as a microphone, to the various speakers for best sound quality.

Depending on what happens with the delta variant, assuming the return to work goes through in September or whenever it does happen, there will be remote people and it is very important to keep them engaged and not disenfranchised. The post-pandemic world presents a huge opportunity to make remote workers equal participants in all hybrid meetings moving forward.

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