Hybrid meetings guide

Prioritizing different configurations of meetings

• In-person meetings: If your team can be physically in the same place, then prioritize in-person brainstorming/debating, relationship/team building, starting new work/working with new people, and working with shared physical artifacts.
• All-online meetings work well for all-hands, routine/information-sharing meetings, and regular 1:1 meetings. They can work well for well-planned brainstorms when everyone is using the same shared digital resources, because they reduce problems of concurrent talk and let everyone see one another.
• Hybrid meetings: Sometimes the benefits of hybrid meetings for local participants outweigh the costs to remote participants. The ability for local people to generate shared emotion, spark ideas off one another, and engage in concurrent conversations can be very valuable. Plan hybrid meetings that allow local participants to make the most of their ability to engage dynamically and share physical resources, while limiting the disadvantages for remote participants.

Obligatory versus optional remote attendance in hybrid meetings

• People work remotely for obligatory reasons (e.g. work restrictions, differences in abilities, employees in different global offices), or they choose to remote work generally (e.g. to enable a flexible working schedule) or situationally (e.g. prefer not to commute that day).
• A group may decide to make different accommodations for an obligatory remote participant than one who chooses to be remote.

Number and role of remote participants in hybrid meetings

The fewer remote participants there are in a hybrid meetings the fewer people will be disadvantaged but the more likely they are to be excluded.

• ​​​​​If a manager or organizer is remote, there may be less need to go all-remote because they are unlikely to be excluded.
• If a job candidate nor new hire is remote, going all-online/remote both reduces the power imbalance, makes it easier for the candidate/new hire to identify and engage with other attendees.

Distribution of collocated and remote participants in hybrid meetings

Different configurations of hybrid meetings have different power distributions to be considered.

• Hub and satellite: One big local group with one or very few remote individual participants. Here the remote participants are heavily outnumbered and likely to be disadvantaged.
• Hub and spoke: One local group with many remote endpoints that may have individuals or groups of participants. Here the numeric distribution is more equal or remotes may outnumber local participants, but the hub is still likely to be treated as a center of power. Hub and spoke models work well in broadcast model meetings such as all hands as audiences become very large.
• Dumbbell (2 groups) and Constellation (multiple groups): Each location has a group of roughly the same size. This is often more equal in terms of power, although there is usually a key ‘host’ hub. Such meetings are likely to schism, with more attention being paid to local versus remote participants. However, this may work to enable each group to collaborate locally and then report back to the meeting as a whole.

Avoid scheduling inequalities

• Check remote attendees’ time zones, including holidays, and share the burden of early/late meetings.
• Schedule meetings to start 5 minutes after the hour or half hour, to give everyone breaks between meetings.
• Ensure that there is reasonable lead time for all participants, not just local ones.

Prepare for inclusion

• Teams which include people of different abilities should develop standard procedures that they use and communicate when meetings include new people. Including people with disabilities (opens in new tab) and neurodiverse people (opens in new tab) in hybrid meetings requires additional planning for access to the views, assistive technologies, and resources they need to fully participate and manage how they are seen and represented in meetings.
• In a given meeting, the organizer should communicate needs and model the relevant behavior. For example, when low-vision people are in a meeting, especially with new people, ensure that everyone says their name when they speak (at least the first time), and if screen-sharing is used, ask the sharer to more explicitly describe what they are showing.

Prepare for brainstorms

• Ensure that all participants are using the same version of the same tools, and that everyone knows how to access them.
• Ensure clearly structured activities and timing, communicated beforehand. You cannot rely on the cohering effect of being in a local room.
• Consider how to enable local and remote users to work together rather than in local versus remote cliques.
• Consider spreading brainstorming out between asynchronous and synchronous work to maximize live time together.

Set expectations

• Ensure everyone knows the goal of the meeting.
• Ensure that everyone knows any rules of conduct. The CHARMS mneumonic is a helpful start.

What should we do socially at the start of the meeting?

• Join the meeting in the room and on your laptop or phone as soon as you enter the room, to help remote people join in small talk.
• As the meeting starts, ensure that everyone has been introduced.

Orient remote people to the local room

• Let remote participants know, at the beginning of a meeting, how they are seen and heard in the room. This helps remote participants judge how best to engage. If this changes substantially, let remote participants know.​​​​​​​

Meeting chat

• Everyone should have a device open to the meeting chat when it is used.
• Encourage chat that engages with the meeting’s topic and makes the meeting more inclusive. Read more in our meeting chat guide (opens in new tab).

Taking turns

• Use the hand raise feature. You can see the order of hand raises at the top of the meeting roster (via the Participants link).
• Invite remote people to speak first on any issue.
• Encourage only one person to talk at a time.
• Be clear about when you have reached the end of your thought. You may want to explicitly select the next speaker.
• Wait longer for responses than you would for an all in-person meeting.
• Share re-starts: If you re-started last time, let someone else re-start this time.

​​​Notes and recordings

• Ensure that everyone knows where to find meeting notes and the recording if there is one. Incorporate chat highlights into meeting recaps.

What should we do socially at the end of the meeting?

• Don’t just stand up and leave the room! Say goodbye to remote participants and ensure that any room device has left the meeting.

Start meeting room devices immediately

• The first person in the room should immediately start whatever room device is available, to bring in remote attendees.
• Microsoft Teams users—The first person in the room with a Microsoft Teams Room (opens in new tab) (MTR) device should join the meeting on their laptop or phone first and select ‘Room audio’. Teams will recommend a room based on your location. You can also select a different room from the menu if necessary. When you join, Teams will then join the MTR device automatically.

Using personal devices

A laptop, phone, or tablet in a meeting can be distracting, but they have the advantage of letting you access chat, raise hand, reactions, in-meeting apps, collaboration tools, and enable remote participants to see your face.

• On a laptop, join the meeting​ with video on and audio off (mute system sounds too). Orient your laptop so your face is in view when sitting back in your seat. When you move in to use chat, you’ll be looking down at the screen.
• On a mobile or tablet it may make more sense to join with video off unless you have a stand.
• If all in-person attendees have personal video then the room video may not be useful. Check whether remote participants want to see the room video.

Sharing views of physical whiteboards or objects

• Try to give remote people a good view of physical whiteboards or objects using a spare laptop or phone.
• Microsoft Teams users: ​​​​​​
  • Use the Content Camera (opens in new tab) mode with an MTR device or laptop and a plug-in USB camera.
  • If those aren’t to hand, you need something more ad hoc, or you need a more maneuverable view, you can use Companion Mode to add your mobile phone as an additional camera to share into the meeting (video or still photos). See how to join a Teams meeting on a second device (opens in new tab) and then share content in a meeting in Teams (opens in new tab).

Task space and person space

• If you have two screens, in a room or at home, decide which will be the task/content space, and which will be the people space and align cameras your camera with the people space. (opens in new tab)

Organizational meeting spaces

• Wherever remote participants appear in a meeting room, try to align cameras and speakers with them so that their visual and sound representation are matched and have a clear and consistent physical position in the room.
• All participants in the local room should know where the room microphones are and sit as close to them as possible. If you are setting up rooms, you might want to mark areas where there is poor audio.
• Eye contact with remote people is often broken in rooms with a 360-degree room cameras in the middle of a table and screens on a wall. You can limit the problem by each person using a personal device facing the 360 degree camera (minimizing view blocking).