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Business Culture
THE COMMUNICATION CONUNDRUM: GOING HYBRID, STAYING PRODUCTIVE
Oct 6
(6 min read)
CONTRIBUTOR
David F. Carr
AS MORE ORGANIZATIONS ADOPT A HYBRID WORK MODEL IN THE WAKE OF THE COVID-19
PANDEMIC, SOME WONDER WHETHER PRODUCTIVITY WILL SUFFER. BUT WITH THE RIGHT TOOLS
AND APPROACH—ESPECIALLY AROUND COMMUNICATION—A HYBRID ENVIRONMENT CAN BE A
BUSINESS ENABLER.
As they settle in to what for many is now a permanent hybrid work environment,
organizations are now facing a new challenge: making hybrid work productive.
The shift to hybrid work may not be a permanent move in workplaces where
management is determined to bring everyone back in the office. But in other
companies—especially those that saw a boost of productivity during the pandemic
and full-time work from home—many are taking a more measured approach, either
allowing 100% remote work or a mix of in-office and remote work. “Companies that
were in a good place culturally and with their technology stack have really
reaped the benefits,” says Sam Adams, CEO at 1Focus LLC, a digital consulting
firm based in Tampa. But to move forward with hybrid work, he adds, leaders need
to rethink how they manage communication, meetings and the purpose of those
meetings.
COMMUNICATION CLASH
Any organization that isn’t 100% in-person or 100% distributed will have to
figure out how to make different modes of work, well, work. Encouraging positive
hybrid work experiences (and avoiding horrible ones) is suddenly far more of a
corporate issue because it’s now a common experience.
For one, remote participants miss out on spontaneous hallways conversations,
which sometimes are more important than what happens in a meeting. In a recent
Gartner webinar on managing hybrid work, analyst Brent Cassell, VP on the HR
Advisory team, lamented that too many organizations “have compensated by
scheduling more and more meetings.” The problem, he says, is it’s hard to get in
the flow of work “if you’re in back-to-back meetings.”
Managers tend to treat meetings as the default way to communicate, get work done
and build team cohesion when asynchronous modes of communication and
collaboration can be as or even more effective, Cassel says.
Quantity is one thing, but the quality of meetings is altogether another issue.
To their credit, some of the more popular collaboration vendors recognize the
inherent communication limitations that plague the online meeting space and are
doing something about it. Earlier this year, Microsoft rolled out a series of
hybrid work upgrades to its Teams collaboration platform and partnered with
conference room manufacturers on technologies to enhance the communication
experience, such as cameras that pan and zoom robotically to keep up with
whoever is speaking and multiple display arrangements that more intelligently
display remote participants, not just screen shares.
Cisco announced a similar series of upgrades to its WebEx for hybrid meetings.
For example, the My Voice Only feature in WebEx filters out background noise and
voices, making it easier to participate in an online meeting while in a busy
office. For meetings on a large scale, including conferences and company town
hall events, Zoom now has a Zoom Events platform that tries to replicate some of
the “conversations in the hallways” experiences that remote attendees otherwise
cannot get at an online event.
WORTH THE INVESTMENT?
But while the vendors are stepping up to improve their communication and
collaboration technologies, technology leaders must decide how much to invest in
new meeting room tech versus making better use of technology they already have.
Jonathan Feldman, CIO for the City of Asheville, North Carolina, is working on
upgrading all municipal conference rooms with better microphones as well as
pan-and-tilt videoconference cameras that can be set to adjust to a few
pre-built angles on the room (for example, to focus on the head of the table
versus the whiteboard). However, his preferred solution for hybrid meetings is
avoiding them.
“For meetings, we’re trying to make them all-remote or all in-person,” Feldman
says, because that’s the best way to put everyone on a level playing field. “The
worst situation is where you have four people in a conference room and two
remote [workers],” as many times the “real conversations” happen among the
in-person attendees after the remote participants have logged off. That is often
when decisions actually are made, he says.
For an all-remote meeting, Feldman and others in his office will sign in
separately on their own devices rather than gather in a conference room, where
remote participants might feel excluded. Having the whole team together in one
room is still the ideal environment for people to engage, he says, but
inevitably there will be instances in which one or more important participants
are remote for an otherwise in-person meeting, which is why conference room
upgrades make sense, he says.
However, he adds, “I don’t think we’ll spend a ton of money, because you still
have to train people.”
Adams says he coaches organizations to do a better job of planning meetings to
ensure meetings are worthy of participants’ time. Those planning activities can
happen asynchronously via group messaging channels such as Slack.
For well-managed companies, investing in new communication and conference room
technologies “makes sense and will be a force multiplier,” he says. “But on the
other hand, garbage in, garbage out.
“You could have Star Trek Holodeck technology, but if you don’t have the right
organization, it won’t do you much good,” he notes.
Steve diFilipo, a CIO and consultant in the higher education space, says campus
administrative workers learning to adapt to hybrid work should be able to learn
from educators, many of whom have been doing both online and in-person teaching
for years. “Dual modality” classrooms exist on most campuses, so administrators
“may not want to go into a conference room anymore if they can grab a spare
classroom, he says.
Relatively low-cost devices such as the Owl 360-degree camera, which autofocuses
on the person who is speaking, also may be worth considering, diFilipo says, but
adds that people who are motivated to collaborate will make do with whatever
technology is readily available.
“I was in a meeting the other day where it was just everyone gathered around a
laptop, very impromptu, joining other people on Zoom, just leaning in together,”
he says, noting he’s seen other meetings take place in the corner of the library
or out in the parking lot, with a laptop propped up on the hood.
These days, “do it yourself adaptability” is a key skill for communicating and
collaborating, diFilipo says. “You can make it work if you’re willing to think
outside the box.”
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. 1.
Organizations must consider how they manage communication, meetings and
their purpose in the new hybrid work model.
2. 2.
Meetings have become the default mode of communication, yet asynchronous
modes can be as or even more effective.
3. 3.
A number of collaboration vendors are addressing the inherent communication
limitations that plague the online meeting space.
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