Transcript

LISETTE SUTHERLAND:

Good hybrid meetings are a combination of good infrastructure, good design, and good facilitation, and I'll start with infrastructure. So, one of the important things is if you've got an old conference room table with the old spider phone in the middle of the desk and you're leaning over like, hey, Bob, it's Lisette. Can you hear me?

If you still have that kind of infrastructure in your office spaces, which some companies still do, that's not going to be a very – I would say the remote participants in that situation are going to be more like the mosquitoes in the room. You kind of know that they're there, and you can hear them, but you really wish that they weren't there.

So, in your conference rooms and offices, one, we're going to need more of them because there's going to be a lot more hybrid calls, as this is the new way of working. So, some companies have converted a whole bunch of their smaller offices into just a whole bunch of video conferencing rooms. And you're going to just need the basic equipment, which is cameras, being able to see each other, and a good microphone system, and easy to use equipment.

Now, the good thing is that conference room equipment is so easy to use now. I mean, it's so easy to install and use. It's not like the old days when you had to have the IT department come in and help you set everything up. But we just need enough of them, and the important part is just to be easily seen and heard.

Now, it's not just up to the companies to have good equipment. It's up to the individuals to also have a proper setup at home as well. So, if you're going to be working in a remote place, at the very least, like have a quiet background, a good internet connection, maybe a headset or a webcam, something, a way that you can connect with your team if you need to.

And in fact, I interviewed a company several years ago named Envato, they were in Australia, and they were founded by digital nomads, and they encouraged people in their company to work anywhere they wanted for three months of the year. They said, go anywhere you want, but if you go, you have to have an internet connection of a minimum of 20 megabits per second upload or download. Otherwise, you're considered on vacation. So yes, go wherever you want, but here's the minimum requirements that you need in order to work like that.

So, I would say if we're going into this hybrid environment – during the pandemic, we were all at our kitchen tables, in the corners of our houses trying to make ends meet and make do. But if you're going to work remotely moving forward, you're going to have to have a proper setup wherever you're working, whether that's at home or if you're on the road somewhere.

So that's infrastructure. So that's pretty easily solvable. It just needs a little attention and focus. The bigger questions though are design and facilitation.

And a couple of years ago, Atlassian came out with a report on what was considered a good online meeting or what was considered a good online meeting. And all that was considered was it had to have a purpose, an agenda, and it had to start and end on time. That's it. And if you had those three things, most people would consider your meeting to be good. So, for me, that's a pretty low bar of just having a purpose, an agenda, and starting and ending on time.

So, the next aspect of the meeting is really designing. Do we really need to have this meeting to begin with, or can any part of the meeting be done asynchronously? If we're going to brainstorm, we should brainstorm separately, come to the table with our own ideas already formed, and then use our valuable time together synchronously for discussions or decision making.

Or for instance, if I'm going to come to a meeting, excuse me, if I'm going to come to a meeting and just give a presentation, why not record the presentation before the meeting starts, and then use your valuable time together for discussions and decision making. So, we have to really now with – because we're having so many meetings, we really need to design for either a more asynchronous, things that we're preparing for before the meeting starts, or more engagement during the meeting. Maybe we want to have more breakout rooms or getting to ways to have more people speak, and then that's where we come into the facilitation.

So, when we had meetings in-person, we could kind of get away with sloppy facilitation skills or agendas that weren't fully formed because we have so much information with each other in the room. When we go hybrid or online, especially hybrid, we have to have good facilitation skills so that we can bring out every voice that's there in the room. Because every person attending is there for a reason if you're designing for a good meeting. You don't have hundreds of people in a meeting.

So, if you're facilitating, you want to know, well, how can I bring out some of the quieter voices? How can I redirect the conversation? And there's all kinds of skills like paraphrasing, summarising, asking things like, who's got something different?

Or maybe you try a liberating structure where you – one of my favourites is called 1-2-4-all. So, you start with a one-minute silent brainstorm. Then you pair people into groups of two, then you combine those groups of two into fours, and then you bring everybody back. And what happens is the quieter voices, if they have good ideas, those ideas get amplified by the louder voices as the group, as the size of the group increases, and that brings everybody's idea to the surface.

So, there's all kinds of techniques like this that we can learn in terms of facilitation, to how to address conflict in a meeting. There's ways of doing that. And even just having a few of these things in your toolbox will increase the quality of any meeting going forward.

So yeah, in the past, maybe it was more fun or more efficient or more productive to all meet in-person, but that is no longer our reality. And so, the reality now is meetings need to be done a little bit differently. And for that, we need design, infrastructure, and facilitation skills.

So, it sounds complicated, but really, I think we all benefit so much more by having a few of these skills in our toolbox. But there's no reason not to do it. It makes meetings more fun and productive. Because ultimately that's what we want, right? We want to reduce the number of meetings that we need and improve the ones that we're having.

One of the biggest engagement hacks that I can recommend for meetings is starting every meeting with an icebreaker. And I can hear the groans already. Like oh, some people really like icebreakers, and some people really don't.

Now, the thing to recognise is icebreakers don't have to be silly. It doesn't always have to be your favourite vacation spot or what are you wearing on your feet right now. Take a picture of something on your desk. It doesn't have to be funny stuff. You can also set the tone by saying, what are you here – what are you hoping to get out of this meeting today, or what expertise are you bringing to the table today to help solve problem X that we're here to try to solve?

So, we can start a meeting with an icebreaker question, and the point of an icebreaker is to get everybody speaking once. Because science shows that when people have spoken once before a meeting starts, they're more likely to speak up again. They're more comfortable speaking into a group. So, the point of an icebreaker is not just to be silly or team building, which also has its function, but it's also an engagement hack to bring it out.

Now, there's other things that we'll need to do as a facilitator. That's why it's so important to have a facilitator to begin with. Our role as a facilitator is to bring out the voices in the group in order to accomplish the purpose that we're there for.

So, we want to recognise if somebody is not speaking, is it because they have nothing to say or is it because they're scared of speaking? You want to make sure that everybody's contributing. Whether you do that through polling or through whiteboards or through breakout groups, this is why it's important to have facilitator training so that you can see like, oh, maybe we need to go in a breakout group right now, or oh, let's do an anonymous poll and take a temperature check of how everybody feels about this issue in the room. You want to be able to set those things up on the fly and recognise when they're needed.

There's a lot of things that we can do to set expectations. I set expectations for meetings before they start. So, in the meeting invite, I'll say, this is going to be an interactive meeting. You'll be expected to have the cameras on. Or maybe your team has a team agreement, and you've discussed for people that we want to have a cameras-on environment.

There are a lot of people who really hesitate with cameras-on. And for that one, I would advise, it's good to learn about why they don't want to have it on. Sometimes there's a very good reason. One woman had just come back from a dentist appointment, and her whole face was numb or like a surgery, and so there's valid reasons, of course.

But then the other thing to recognise or the approach I always like to take is from Zig Ziglar, who is a famous salesperson in the United States. And he always said in his talks, you want to listen to WII FM radio, which stands for What's In It For Me. So, we want to think in terms of what's in it for the person if they turn on their camera. So, what would be in it for them? So, we want to turn it a little bit like, OK, what do you get when you turn the camera on, instead of trying to convince them that that's the right thing to do. So, there's that.

I never force people to do it, but I do try to set the expectations, or I'll do an exercise where they need to show something, so they'll have to turn it on, or they'll have to participate through the chat. I recognise that some people have valid reasons.

And the way that I started is I am an always-on person, so my camera will always be on, and I'll just do it even if I'm the only person. I'll just do it as a matter of course. Usually, the extroverts in the group will then turn the cameras on because they enjoy it a little bit more, and slowly the culture will build.

But it does take somebody to lead the charge and be a champion, and also to figure out why is it that people don't want to turn their cameras on to begin with, because sometimes there's valid reasons.

Maybe they have kids in the background, or I'm not sure what it might be. I love having my camera on. I love seeing other people on the side of the screen.

I get so distracted whenever there's no cameras on, I mean, that emails are coming in and other things are pinging me, so I like the focus of having the cameras on, but I do understand some people don't like it. I think it's a conversation to have as a team of why people don't want to do it. It's a culture that we build.