What it takes to run a great hybrid meeting.
Frisch, B., & Greene, C. (2021, June 03). What it takes to run a great hybrid meeting. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved June 10, 2024 from
https://hbr.org/2021/06/what-it-takes-to-run-a-great-hybrid-meeting Drawing from our combined half-century of experience designing and facilitating meetings for executive teams and boards, we’ve assembled eight best practices to help make your hybrid meetings more effective:
- Up your audio game. Great audio is critical, but often overlooked until the last minute. Participants have an expectation to hear everything clearly. Make sure the room is equipped with plenty of high-quality microphones. Or supplement the audio input by passing around a hand-held microphone.
- Consider video from the remote participant’s perspective. What do remote participants need in order to fully engage? See faces of in-room attendees, see presentations, documents, content created during the meeting.
- Test the technology in advance. Technology glitches in audio and/ or video fills the meeting momentum. Schedule 10-15 minute dry run.
- Design meetings for all attendees. Review each activity or exercise through the lens of how remote participants will engage. Utilize virtual tools (such as polling feature, virtual whiteboard) that will maximize interactions with in-room attendees.
- Provide strong facilitation. “Managing a hybrid meeting is harder than when the whole group is in person or on Zoom together. One person – a staff member, an outsider or a meeting participant—should be assigned to guide the conversation and keep it on track.” Draw the remote attendee in, keep them engaged, make sure their voices are heard. Call on remote attendees for their responses to make sure in-person attendees to not dominate the discussion.
- Remote attendees need some kind of physical presence in the room. This could be a name card, a post it note, a poker chip placed on the table for each remote attendee to remind in-person participants of the virtual population.
- Give each remote participant an in-room “avatar.” This is a fellow participant who can be their physical presence in the meeting room as required. Whether via text, chat, or phone, they have a private line of communication constantly available throughout the meeting. “Having confidential access to a single point-of-contact goes a long way to removing a sense of isolation or distance from those in the room itself.” The in-person avatar can approach others in the room on break and remind them to speak up so their person attending remotely can hear.