Six Must-Haves for Hybrid Meetings

A hybrid meeting is a meeting where some participants are in the room together and others are online. And they are scary. They’re more terrifying than a meeting where everyone is online. Why? Because a good meeting is fundamentally about inclusion. When some participants can’t see, hear, or share their ideas as easily as others, it is only human to feel excluded. All it takes is for one person in the room to lean over and whisper something to the person seated next to them, and bam: online participants feel like second-class citizens.

Even if they’re sharing the load, it’s easy for online participants to feel invisible in a hybrid meeting.

The problem with hybrid meetings is not technological, it’s human. I’ve been on the lookout for good human solutions to hybrid meetings. And I’m not the only one. My friend Rae Ringel (she’s in Surviving the Horror of Online Meetings, page 71) and her colleague Maya Bernstein have just written an article that identify six must-haves for every hybrid meeting.

You can find them here. Go check ‘em out.

Designing the Post-Pandemic Meeting by Rae Ringel and Maya Bernstein. Shared with permission.

Oh, and I’m still on the lookout good solutions for hybrid meetings! If you know any great agreements, activities, or experience that make hybrid meetings more inclusive, please share.