Overcoming Challenges in Mixed-Mode (Hybrid) Workshops

[Bryan F]

Hey Teamwork Lab community!

In my corporate world, everyone seems much more inclined to meet in-person, though we still need to involve others across Asia Pacific. It often creates the situation where the majority will be in a room, with a handful of others in different offices joining virtually.

Frequent challenges with this format tend to be:

• The Laptop Barrier: When everyone (both in-person and remote) has their laptop open, engagement tends to drop. It's easy for participants to get distracted by emails or other work, disconnecting from the workshop itself. 
• Participation Imbalance: Our in-person attendees often dominate discussions and activities, while virtual participants struggle to contribute equally. This can create an uneven experience and limits the diversity of input we receive.

An example of when I felt a hybrid workshop went really well was a client workshop when we had three rooms from three different countries. For the ideation parts, we had the client 'pair up' with one of our employees and which help in a few ways:

• Client didn't have to be onboarded and 'learn' the virtual whiteboard tool.
• Kept both the employee and client engaged in the activity, rather than checking mail in the background.
• Helped our employees build better rapport with the client, through forcing discussion and teamwork on the problems.

To kick off the discussion, I'm keen to hear from the community:

1. What's been your most successful strategy for ensuring equal participation from both in-person and remote attendees in hybrid workshops?
2. Have you discovered any unique or creative activities that work particularly well in a hybrid setting?

[Amanda Barber]

When my company still had an office, I appreciated that they had a decent setup for the camera/microphones in-office with an Owl camera that followed who was speaking. This helped ensure that the remote employees could follow along easily - it was still much harder to be remote for hours on end though. 

Breakout rooms can be key for both remote and hybrid to ensure everyone gets a turn to speak. As a remote employee, it was always hard to get a word in when the hybrid folks were in-office - which was absolutely understandable with the way we interact in-person!

[Bryan F]

Great tech is important. We recently got a new office fitout and they have screens with digital whiteboard markers…. but then turned that functionality off do to information security issues 🤦

The challenge with the in-person/digital divide seems to mostly be latency based, those in the room have a half a second headstart in the conversation, often cutting those off trying to contribute virtually. When i facilitate I tend to give a platform for virtual participants to contibute to the topic either at the start or middle of the topic. I feel leaving it to the end makes it feel like an afterthought. 

[James Hendrix]

It almost always comes down to the facilitator taking on the responsibility to directly engage the remote participants. There are both structured and unstructured means of doing so, so even a session that lacks rich planning can benefit from directly calling on specific remote participants for input.

I don't have a favorite technique, but I do find that there are some general practices that make these sessions more productive and balanced between remote and in-person participants:

1. Encourage camera use. It helps if there is already a culture and expectation that participants use their cameras.
2. Engage remote participants early. Involve them directly in ice breakers, introductions, and setting expectations.
3. Encourage chat responses and discussions. Turn a disadvantage into an advantage and encourage remote participants to type their ideas and points into a chat that is either on-screen or otherwise in common use throughout the workshop.
4. Call on specific people by name. Regardless of meeting format, it is always a good idea to encourage the less vocal participants to contribute.
5. Incorporate polls and interactivity. If you have the tech, make use of it! Instantly gauge participation by distributing a poll. Again, low-tech alternatives exist--get people raising their hands with from zero to five fingers as a rating system, for example.
6. Have room participants represent their remote counterparts. This can be especially useful if there are team alignments with both in-person and remote members. Ask room participants to engage and care for their remote team members.
7. Plan breakout sessions for remote participants. While hybrid breakout groups have their advantages, there's nothing like levelling the playing field by having all remote participants breakout together (or multiple sub-groups if you have many remote participants and the technology to support live breakouts that segment audio).

I sincerely dislike workshops that ask me to close my laptop because I use it to take notes, ensure no critical issues are happening, and to use existing information to support the workshop topics. As an experienced instructor and facilitator, I find that this rule to keep laptops closed often has people leaving the workshop altogether to handle some imagined emergency. Of course, there are times when it can be appropriate to restrict technology use, but then frequent/extended breaks should be planned at regular intervals to compensate.