As we move back to Grounds, you may find that meetings involve some participants who are in the room, and others who are remote. This new environment will take some getting used to. Here are a few tips for hybrid meetings.
Preparation
- Know the room where you will be meeting. Take a little time to consider the best set up for the meeting,and test the technology.
- Designate someone in the room to be responsible for monitoring Zoom (the chat, raised hands, etc.)
- Start the meeting with an explanation of how you will ensure everyone can participate and contribute.
- Depending on the meeting’s purpose, ask an in-person participant to take notes to share with all participants afterwards.
Technology
- Ensure that the audio in the room is sufficient both for hearing the remote participants when they speak and for the remote participants to hear those in the room.
- Share the Zoom link prior to the meeting with all participants.
- Consider having all participants (in the room and remote) sign into the Zoom meeting on their own laptops, especially if there is content that will be shared or you expect a lively chat to occur. If you do this, you’ll need to ask in-person participants to mute their audio and/or select “no” to joining zoom audio, or it will cause feedback with the room’s audio.
Communications
- Have a plan for questions and comments from the remote participants. Should they type in the chat box? Raise their hand? Speak out? Depending on the meeting one may be a better option than another.
- Take a second to acknowledge the awkwardness and draw everyone’s attention to the fact that the situation is different from fully online or fully in-person experiences participants have had.
- Encourage in-person participants to proactively leave space and time for online participants to speak, and to regularly ask for their contributions.
- Depending on the size of the meeting, in-person participants should identify themselves when they speak.
- Consider recording the meeting, assuming privacy/confidentiality are not an issue.
- Consider turning on Zoom transcription (note, transcripts are a type of recording, so consider privacy/confidentiality issues).
- If breaking out into smaller groups, it’s easiest to have online participants work together online, and in-person participants work together in person.
- Use an online whiteboarding tool that everyone can see, rather than the wall-mounted board. For example, share the zoom whiteboard via a screen/monitor in the room.
- Consider having an in-person participant assume the role of ‘interpreter’ -- a person taking special care to clarify incomplete sentences, body language, etc for remote participants. Body language that’s easy to read in the room can be missed by remote participants.
0 Comments
Add your comment