Speaker 1: We've got a great show this time. It's all about those mixed mode meetings, those hybrid meetings. What do I mean about those? Well, by those rather, I mean those meetings where you've got some people attending remotely and some people who are attending in person. So from a facilitation point of view, how best to handle those meetings? Now, I've been doing those meetings for a long time, well before COVID. And that's because there are teams where some people work in different locations and some people are in the same building. So bringing them all together just makes sense to do some virtually and some in person and have the same session. And I've seen more and more of that actually as we've started to emerge from COVID. And I think there's really a trend of having more video calls than audio calls. I think post COVID, all those telephone conferences, many of them will disappear and they'll be replaced by some form of video call. I think that's my prediction anyway. We'll see what happens. So I thought it would be really useful to just have a session now, some quick tips. I think I've got about 11 of them for how to get a really successful mixed mode or hybrid meeting. So where you're online and you've got in person participants. So I will be back in just a few seconds after this.

Speaker 2: This is the idea time show, idea time show with Dr. Jo North. Helping facilitators expand their creativity, confidence and impact through the power of innovation in action. Gain confidence as a facilitator, confidence with the technology and confidence with your content and event design. Tune in every week for practical tips, strategies and interviews that will accelerate your personal and business success. And now here's your host, Dr. Jo North.

Speaker 1: Our theme is all around hybrid meetings, mixed mode meetings. They are meetings where or workshops where you've got people attending remotely, virtually, as well as in person and how to manage them. Because if they're not managed well, then they could be a really poor experience, both for everybody attending and for you as the facilitator. So I really hope you enjoy these tips. I hope they're helpful and you can use them as a checklist to think about as you're hosting and facilitating your virtual and in person meetings simultaneously because there's quite a lot to think about. So here we go. The first tip is to test the visual and audio in all locations and have a dry run. Now, I've been an attendee actually at a meeting really recently where I was a virtual attendee and there were some people in the room and I just felt quite excluded from everything. I wasn't facilitating, I was a guest, but the facilitator really focused on the people in the room. And the worst thing was that the audio was awful and the visuals were awful because I couldn't really see what was going on in the room particularly well. It was a really long, narrow room that I was looking into. And also the audio, I might have sounded okay, my other remote colleagues might have sounded okay to the people in the room, but for us, the people in the room sounded terrible because there was such an echo. It sounded really as if the conversation was reverberating. So test how it is. Get somebody in each location, in the remote ends, as well as in the physical locations, just to test how all of that works and make some modifications so that you can see how well people can see each other and maybe reconfigure furniture and seating and so on. And also you can test the audio as well. So that's just a really simple, straightforward thing to do. But so many people stand in the room, make sure the room's set up, make sure that the people in the room can see the people on the screen, but it's so important to do it the other way around. And also make sure that the people who are attending virtually can see and hear the people in the room as well. So it sounds common sense, isn't it? But sometimes just we need a bit of a reminder. So the next tip is to allow for delayed speech for the remote attendees. And also things like live streaming taking a little bit longer. There's usually a delay for people to hear remotely for sound to be transmitted. Now, when we're all on the same remote call, we're experiencing this sort of similar level of delay. So we're all pretty much in the same sort of synchronicity, if you like, as long as one person doesn't have really bad, you know, really, really bad Wi-Fi or something. But when there are people in the room, all of that moves much faster. And it's really important to allow for what people are saying in the room to actually reach the people who are listening in and watching in remotely. And the delay is usually about five to seven seconds. So I find it really helpful to ask the audience who are in person right at the start of the meeting to take that delay into account and just give it a second, just give it a pause to allow the virtual attendees to hear what's been said and join in. So just slow things down a little bit and really allow for that. Because if you don't do that, then what happens is people bump into each other, people can't get a word in, and it gets very frustrating. So that's how it is. Technology is a wonderful thing. It's brilliant to have mixed mode meetings, as long as we manage them properly. And as long as we understand how we need to work and how we need to behave to adjust for some of the challenges that it can present if we don't think about it fully. One of the biggest mixed mode or hybrid meetings I've ever facilitated, I was on for a credit card data processing company, and I was working on their leadership conference and facilitating that. And I had attendees from all over the world who were tuning in virtually as well as a load of people, about 100 people in front of me in the room. And juggling all of that was, I just really enjoyed it actually. I was on stage and my aim was to make the people who were attending virtually feel just as engaged, just as much a part of it as the people who were in person. And all of these tips that I'm sharing with you absolutely helped with that. I had to do it twice actually. I had to do the same event twice, back to back, to cover all the time zones that were involved. It was an absolutely massive event. That was pre-COVID as well, quite a while ago. And which brings me on to the next tip, which is to make sure that you look at the virtual attendees as much as you look at the people who are in the room, if you're in the room with everybody. And obviously if you're facilitating virtually and you have people in a room, then just make sure that you give everybody eye contact through the camera and do all those usual things that I've been talking about on the show. It's really bad if there's a room full of people with a facilitator in and some virtual attendees, and it feels like all the action's happening in the in-person space. And none of that action is really, none of the attention is being directed in quite the way it should be to the people who are there remotely. So make sure you turn, you look at the screen, you look at the camera, you talk to the camera just as much as you might turn and talk to the in-person attendees as well. So really important to make everybody feel included. I mentioned about slowing down so that you could take into account all the delays. Well, as well as slowing down for delays, it also helps you to speak more clearly and to pronounce each word fully. Again, that's important because if you're facilitating in a room, you've got the acoustics of the room to consider, and it's important that your words get through to the people watching remotely and to account for that delay as well. So just slow down and take a little bit of extra time to pronounce everything as clearly as you can, and that will help. Also, you're leading by example, so I think people will pick up on that. Don't go so slowly that you sound a little bit patronising, but just slow it down, put a pause in, and let the message get from where you are to the people who are listening. The next one is really simple. Sometimes people want to speak, they've got a point they want to make, and for this I use a physical or virtual hand-up. So use the hand-up button on something like Zoom or Teams for people who are engaging remotely and just a simple hand-up for those people who are there in person. And just acknowledge that you've seen them, acknowledge to people who are watching virtually as well that you've seen that they've got their hand up too, and then that just helps you organise everything so much better. Simple but effective. The other thing is to steer in-person participants away from side conversations and having situations where there's more than one voice at a time. Because if you've got a number of people speaking, then that sounds awful when you're watching remotely and you can't hear properly what's been said and who's saying what. And also those side conversations really detract from the main event. So keep everybody engaged, one person speaking at a time, whether you're speaking through an online medium or whether or not you're speaking in person. From a clarity point of view and a visual point of view, using things like gradients, videos and animation can have viewing quality issues. You might show something in a room that looks okay on the screen for the people in the room, but how it transmits to people remotely could be quite...what's the word? From a gradient point of view, it can look quite jagged and rough and not a nice smooth gradient. So a gradient is where you've got one colour merging into another in a design, in a logo, in a background, something like that. And with videos and animation, they can seem very stop-starty or laggy if you're watching them remotely. So unless you've got fantastic streaming capability, test the videos, test the animation, but maybe err on the side of caution. Make sure that you've got the right quality experience for those people watching virtually as well as in the room, because it doesn't always transmit quite as well as it does for you watching yourself in person. The next tip is to repeat a question before answering it. And it's a classical tip. We should all be doing it anyway, actually, to make sure that everybody, whether we're facilitating online or whether we're facilitating a whole in-person event, really understands and has heard what's just been asked. So there's nothing worse than somebody asking a question, only the facilitator hearing it and answering the question, and nobody really knows what the question was or some people missed the question. So always repeat the question and answer it. And that helps everybody understand and be able to participate in what's going on. Make sure everyone can join in breakouts and activities. If you have activities planned, really think through, design well, how can you do things so that everybody can join in and nobody is excluded. Find ways of doing this. Again, well before lockdown, I had some different breakout rooms in different locations. So there were remote delegates joining. Each remote set of delegates, they were all together in the same place. And then I had a room full of people in person as well. And what I did was I worked with the people who were working remotely in these groups in advance and made sure that they had all sorts of bits of equipment and tools, techniques, papers, scissors, all sorts of different things so that they could join in the activities at their end because they were all together. Participate fully, just take some planning and some liaison with people. And we had a really great session and everybody could participate 100% and be part of it. And keep things interactive. You can still use tools that I've talked about here before. MIRO whiteboards. I absolutely love MIRO whiteboards. You can do sticky notes and use it really as a virtual whiteboard that everybody can populate at the same time. They still work and people can access them on their devices if they are joining in person as well as obviously if they're working remotely too. And quizzes, polls, tools like Menti, Mentimeter. So Menti is the delegate version. Mentimeter is the facilitator version. They're different parts of the same tool. They are fantastic for getting polling, quizzes, questions and so on and getting everybody engaged. So you can still do it. It just takes a bit of planning and a bit of practice, but you will develop your own protocol and things that work for you. I hope this checklist is a helpful start if you're just starting to think about doing hybrid meetings, excuse me, or if you're getting back into them maybe. Maybe you've just been doing virtual ones. You might have been doing hybrid ones before, but these might serve as a good reminder for when you get stuck in again to start these. And it's great, isn't it? It's really great what we can do now with hybrid meetings and it means we can have people present who wouldn't have attended before or maybe couldn't have got there for time reasons or travel reasons and we can work with people in the room as well. So technology is amazing and also we're learning so much more. There's more tools coming on board and on stream and they're being improved and developed all the time. If you've enjoyed this, please give me a like, a thumbs up and hit subscribe, hit the bell so you'll be reminded every time that I'm going live. I go live every week on a Thursday with some tips like these for you, for your innovation, for your facilitation too. And there's loads of free resources. You just need to go over to bigbangpartnership.co.uk resources and fill your boots. There's all sorts of good stuff there that you can download for free. Until then, thanks very much for watching. I'll see you next week.