The Hybrid Challenge: Engaging Your Remote Audience Is Hard Work

During the chaos of large, hybrid meetings, it’s easy to focus on the faces in front of you, to gloss over the camera in the corner of the room and forget about the audience members who are watching through it. For those participating online, this makes it harder to engage with any activities or questions. It puts the online audience into a passive, more observational mindset. There must be better ways to include your virtual audience as much as your in-person one. The new, trending phrase for addressing this issue is “Hybrid Equity.”

The problem is that the term Hybrid Equity has become too broad. It is so widespread that it can be applied to almost every aspect of a business—at the risk of becoming a buzzword that sounds great on a report but ultimately doesn’t mean much, like “Synergy” or “Monetize our Assets.” In order to get to the substance of Hybrid Equity, we need to narrow the scope of the subject to something more manageable. So, for now, we’ll focus on it in the context of large, one-time events.

Hybrid events are growing, and the challenges are too

As the number of hybrid events continues to grow, the challenges of such meetings have become more obvious. According to a research report from Markletic, a large majority of respondents found camaraderie between online and in-person participants was very difficult to accomplish. It also stated that guaranteeing a smooth experience in the meeting overall was a challenge. The different systems being used in hybrid meetings naturally makes it difficult for both groups to interact with the presenter, let alone with each other. Such things must be considered when preparing the meeting in the first place.

Even the task of scheduling becomes more complicated. About half of the companies in the same survey ran into scheduling conflicts when the participants were in multiple time zones. The complications of scheduling will never completely go away but they can be mitigated. Sometimes, certain people can’t all log in at the same time so running the same meeting again for people in a different time zone, or even recording the session for individuals who can’t make it, will ease the scheduling complications.

Finding effective ways to deliver your content

Sometimes, surprisingly simple changes can improve the situation. Placing the camera in the front row, within the clear eyesight of the presenter, will help them remember the online audience and make more of an effort to engage with them. Giving remote participants a view of the in-person audience and the ability to communicate with those involved via a text or voice chat during activities or discussions will greatly bring the two audiences closer. Relying on a text chat would also make it easy to move any Q&A session to just typing in questions so they can be selected and read to the entire audience, giving everyone participating an equal chance to have their questions answered.

There must always be a virtual event producer or two in the mix. They serve as a monitor for those participating online to help answer questions, deal with technical problems, or assist with any other event activities. They are a powerful asset for keeping remote workers engaged with the content. The trick is keeping the hybrid event itself from simply becoming two simultaneous-but-separate meetings. Linking the online meeting with the physical one doesn’t naturally happen, it takes effort, conscious thought, and assistance to effectively connect everyone in the meeting with each other.

The growing pains from hybrid meetings are very real, and the ways to address those pains are still being developed. Over time, standard practices will be established, a new norm will be formed, and companies will be able to carry on unassisted. But until then, it’s up to the professional, independent event producer to fill the gap.

Lee Deaner is President of Leading Edge Training Solutions (www.letstrainonline.com), a leading producer of virtual and hybrid events, informational meetings, and training programs since 2009.