Every meeting will now be an online meeting

Jabs are getting into arms and people are thinking about what a post-Covid world will mean. Some people are very much looking forward to a return to the office and some bosses are looking forward to that sprinkling of that magic ingredient of collaborating together in person. But here's the thing: a move to widespread hybrid working will turn every meeting into an online meeting.

Let's create a model to explain why. Let's create an imaginary organisation. People will be free to come and go as they please. Some will return full time, some will go pretty much full time remote. To simplify the model let's assume that the days that people will choose is evenly distributed (and yes I know that Mondays and Fridays will be as popular as a turd sandwich).

The chances of being in the office with a single colleague without arranging it in advance is shown in the table below. If one or either of you are never in the office, you clearly aren't ever going to run into each other. If you are both in the office every day, that water cooler game talk is going to be strong. Most organisations are talking of two to three days working from home. That makes the random chance of being in the office with someone in between 36% and 16% - not that high.

I live in the lovely city of Brighton and Hove on the south coast of the UK. Imagine I am working for this imaginary company in their office in Canary Wharf in London. I say that I will be in three days a week. I get up at five-something and schlep up to the big smoke paying about ￡50 for the privilege. After a long day of "riffing" I return home at about 7pm. Without intentional and deliberate coordination with colleagues to meet them in person, with only a third of a chance of seeing them, I'm going to be spending most of the day on Microsoft Teams anyway.

But most meetings aren't one-to-ones. Let's add in another participant (I've assumed that they are in the same amount as the one-to-one):

The maths says that the odds that you can get the three of you together on the same day are lengthening. How about more? Asking around people say that six is a normal sort of size for a meeting:

Very quickly you see that the chances of getting everyone together on the same day (let alone the hour) is becoming vanishingly small.

Booming and zooming

Meeting doesn't go away and I don't mean to dissuade organisations from moving to a hybrid working pattern (and I'm a firm believer that there is so much more to collaboration than meetings by moving to more asynchronous methods). But this will mean that all meetings will have an online component. When you sit down in a Canary Wharf meeting room there'll be someone attending remotely most of the time. When you go to your next meeting, you will almost certainly be returning to your hot-desk, putting on a headset and switching on your camera. Personally, I might reflect that my five-something start, ￡50 travelcard and 7pm return might face some stiff competition from staying in bed, not travelling and finishing on-the-dot. In fact, if you should find yourself with a close colleague in the office together, I'd think, "Sod the meeting we can do that anytime." Have a coffee (or a beer if after hours) and focus on gossip and social needs. If you feel you are being coerced into a return to the office I'd recommend keeping a diary of your IRL meetings and if there aren't any, having a pretty straight talk with your boss or HR.

They'll be other strange phenomena to deal with. Putting groups on a one-week-one-one-week-off rotation period. A focus on on the collaboration needs of departments neglects virtual teams delivering end-to-end processes. Focusing on project groups neglects team members operational duties. Junior members of staff desperately need mentoring from the experienced middle management, but those middle managers want to be hobnobbing with the senior leaders for their own development and progression. Who gets to win that Pushmi-pullyu? On reflection, handing everything to the line manager to decide on wisely and dispassionately seems perverse. They will perhaps act in their personal best interest without some pretty firm guidance.

All of these, I'm not that sorry to say, leads me to the conclusion that three-fifths hybrid is more like two-thirds remote. Sorry, but networks don't have linear outcomes. However, organisations have always been desperately inconsistent about the ineffable power of the water-cooler relationship. They have opened operations on the other side of the world, acquired a company in another city or sliced off and outsourced entire functions and not whinged about it. I'm betting on enterprises coping and coping really rather well.

Silver linings

So what is better about online meetings - we can see the broken eggs, but where is the omelette? We have a moment of opportunity to increase meeting utility. We rely on conversation to make sense of the world and to build a shared understanding within groups. Meetings provide all the essential ingredients to build the social relationships that our human brains evolved to crave, but meeting utility is a function of the meeting's productivity - moving stuff forward efficiently in less time, making better and quicker decisions, getting unstuck and getting back to work. In short, now's a good time to purposefully make meetings better. So what's coming down the pipe to help us do that?

Recording, transcription, translation and search

If every meeting is an online meeting, every meeting can be recorded. Meetings can be transcribed and transcriptions are a) searchable and b) translatable. Recording and transcribing have the opportunity to skip the meeting and catch up or just scan the top points made. This has the potential to be positively transformational and negatively destructive if not used wisely. It will take some time for people to come to some good practice here without CYA behaviours unravelling trust between parties, and huge volumes of automatically generated content overwhelming search efforts.

Meeting management

Meetings usually suck. Hybrid meetings have a unique opportunity to re-skill people in a business activity that people feel weirdly is out of their control - like the weather or the laws of physics. With a more solid and persistent technological foundation people can be encouraged to review documents or data, prioritise things, take minutes, document risks, assign actions, stick to the goddamned point and hang-up when you're all done.

Inclusivity

Your organisation has corridors of power. Those corridors are probably in a grand city with some steep real estate prices, or possibly a massive campus with ample parking just off a beltway. Whichever is the case, you have people that are remote from that geographically. Maybe you flew them in once a year for a big meeting or occasionally if the project warranted their input. Now everyone can come to the project scoping session.

Scale

I know when a one-to-one becomes a meeting: you add another chair, but I've no idea when a meeting becomes an event. Online events are generally only limited by limits set by the technology or the license that the organisation has purchased. There are no worries about refreshments, hotel bookings, dietary requirements or whether seating is laid out theatre or classroom style. Of course the last thing you worry about at an event is the content, it is the beer and networking afterwards, but online events are much less disruptive to working and personal lives.

My place or yours?

One thing I've noticed in my strategic research of the meeting user journey is an odd form of commoditisation. Not only do we not much care what solution we are using whether it be Teams, Zoom or anything else, when more than one organisation or group is involved people don't seem to mind much whose solution is used, as long as it works. Sometimes it doesn't work as various blocks might have been put on certain solutions, but groups collaborating externally seem to flow round these rocks like water in a stream. This may block some of the silver linings I've described above. If the transcription or the actions end up in their place and they don't work like that, it's not going to work. We will begin to implicitly create protocols (etiquette) or make explicit decisions (policy) to make sure we know whose environment we meet in and ensure that our meeting good practices don't fall apart if we need to use other solutions.

Digital workplace outcomes

Once again it comes down to this: Do you feel that this is a change that managers and employees will successfully navigate themselves, or is there a better chance of success if you manage outcomes? There is no business owner for meetings. IT owns Microsoft Teams and the M365 stack. Corporate Real Estate and Facilities own meeting rooms. No one is the owner of better meeting behaviours it is left to the assumed soft skills of the individual, the line manager or project manager. I like to call these "digital workplace outcomes": the collective bundle of understanding and activity that digital workplace practitioners should leverage to make a situation better than it would have been otherwise.

In short, to manage this digital workplace outcome:

1. Understand what your users need to do —Consider the meeting user journey (this is what we do in our Task Trajectory methodology). Carry out as much research as you can to understand people's perspectives and motivations. Describe it for your organisation in a series of user stories or job stories that reflect the new reality of hybrid meeting and understand the path a user would take from intention to realisation. Identify blockers and remove them. Bring stakeholders together in action around the journey, not their platforms or assets.
2. Document how they can do it with the tools you offer — Consider how your tools will address the problems that you have as an organisation. Document their use cases. Indicate what people should be using for what, robustly. Tell people how things will develop over time. Measure what they do use.
3. Advise how to do what they need to do safely and wisely — Develop and communicate demand policy, guidance, support and training all backed by a clever but simple strategy. Be clear about who owns what. Address the idea of better meetings head-on. You will find many allies that can form a champions network. Your opponents won't be any bother, they'll be a meetings all day.

I would focus on over-communicating on the advise-wise part. This is an interesting challenge and one with enormous potential benefits. We have the opportunity to get involved in something that hasn't been challenged for a long time, but because of events now can be. I will reiterate my belief that Digital Workplace, should it be a field, is not about any particular technology, but about being open to digital change and coaching and coaxing our organisations through it. Anyway, sorry gotta dash. I've got another meeting.