How To Maximize Your Hybrid Meetings – During Meetings

The Struggle of Hybrid Work Equality

Ensuring your message and goals come across clearly in a meeting can be challenging no matter the setting and environment, however when you add barriers of being miles away with unreliable communication platforms, decreased engagement and network distractions it becomes a monstrous task.  Adjusting to the hybrid workforce including your overall strategy for meetings. Employees may not see their role in the bigger picture, being detached, they may miss important notes before a meeting or brought up only in-person, and at times feel disjointed from the rest of the company. Read more about preparing for a hybrid meeting here: How To Maximize Your Hybrid Meetings – Premeeting Tips (ntitechnologies.com)

How to Improve Meeting Equality

Hybrid and remote work has become an employee preference, if not standard, over the past several years. When done efficiently and effectively the hybrid work model can give balance and support in trusting, autonomous, and collaborative environments. 76% of employees want to work flexibility in where they work and 93% in when they work. When focusing on how employees work, instead of where, productivity, activity and engagement can all drastically improve.

Here is a checklist of what to make sure your team has for a prime hybrid meeting:

• The Right Resources: The right resources could be ensuring everyone has and is on the right technology, the tools to take notes and a way to properly communicate with the in-person attendees or even having a moderator.
• Thinking of Hybrid Workers in planning: Taking the extra time to think on how you will enable remote workers to partake in engagement pieces will improve the quality of their meeting.
• Limiting Attendees: Limiting Attendees may seem an odd choice, but only invite members of your team to a meeting that pertains to them and their role. If the meeting goal does not entirely align with their role, send them the meetings notes or a recap of the meeting.
• Test Your Equipment: From your video camera, the video angle and sound quality – know they are getting the best experience when in the meeting and not losing out on important aspects like the
• Gather input from Attendees: Prior to the meeting, during the meeting and after are all great opportunities to get input and feedback from all attendees (and those on your to-email list!)

What to do During Hybrid Meetings:

Put everyone on screen.

When it is possible, having everyone be able to see everyone else will greatly increase likelihood of engagement. It will also give more visibility for attendees reactions and perception of the meeting.

Keep Engaged

As a meeting leader, you are tasked with getting the message across clearly, steering in the direction of answering problems and keeping everyone engaged. That can be a lot for one person, so think about sharing this tip with a moderator. How do you keep attendees engaged?

• Questions are a great way to keep in-person and remote meeting attendees engaged with the topic. Ask opinions, thoughts, and crafted questions about the topic.
• Sharing the spotlight is another great way to keep attendees engaged. Have multiple speakers including your attendees.
• Keep focus on the end goal of the meeting, avoid side conversations.

Put Attention on Online Attendees

Start the meeting in an equal manner – give a shout out to your remote attendees! Engage and ask them the first questions separately from in-person attendees. Follow up with your online attendees to ensure they haven’t missed anything at points.

Silence can Tell A lot

Giving moments of silence is another great way to encourage engagement. During speakers talking or moments of silence keep an eye out for people unmuting themselves.

Meeting equality can be difficult to establish at first, however the return on the efforts makes it worth it every time. For any questions or for a free technology review, Contact NTi experts today.