CAVO Ep. 84: Challenges and Best Practices of Leading Hybrid Meetings

Hybrid meetings are a challenge for the leader in making sure everyone has equal opportunity to participate and have their voice heard whether physically present or accessing the meeting remotely. In this episode, Jason Weber, retired Navy analyst and doctoral student in organizational leadership, chats with Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, remote expert dubbed by the New York Times as the office whisperer. Dr. Gleb shares insights and proven strategies to effectively lead meetings with hybrid teams. 

Transcript

Jason Weber
0:02 
Welcome to National University's Center for the Advancement of virtual organizations weekly podcast, our topic challenges and best practices of leading hybrid and remote teams. I'm your host today, Jason Weber, retired Navy analyst and PhD pursued just in the Organizational Leadership track graciously taking over for Dr. Melody Rawlings. And I couldn't be more thrilled to do it. Because right now, I'm joined by none other than the one dubbed by the New York Times as an office whisperer and hybrid expert. Of course, I am speaking about Dr. Gleb of disaster avoidance experts fame, and today, our discussion will focus on leading hybrid teams and maximizing hybrid efficiency. Welcome, and thanks so much for taking the time to chat with us.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky
0:57 
It's a pleasure to be on. Jason, thank you so much for inviting me. I look forward to it.

Jason Weber
1:01 
Absolutely. Dr. Glip, unexcited, about our topic of conversation and to learn more about leading hybrid and remote teams. But to get us started, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky
1:15 
Sure. I've been passionate about decision making. For since my, remember myself early onward, I remember in 1999, there was a.com, boom, and I was 18 at the time, so companies like web, then pets.com, and so on were booming. And then just a couple of years later, they all went crash and when there was a.com crash when I was 21 2001 2002. But you know what the leaders who are praised in the Wall Street Journal in 1999, were the same ones who are criticized in 2001 2002. And they were making decisions the same way. But you know, 199, they were praised 2001 They were criticized. And I saw that it's just in a decision making. People don't know about making good decisions.

Even the titans of industry, you've been in the military, I'm sure you've probably seen some bad decision making in the military as well. consulting for the Defense Department that they have not always done the best job in making good decisions. And so I've worked on this topic, for Yeah, since that time, I went decided to go into academia. So I got a PhD at UNC Chapel Hill. Before that, I got a Master's at Harvard. And then I taught for seven years as a professor at Ohio State University, on decision making. At the same time, I did consulting and training on the side for companies on decision making in the future of work. And so that's what brings us to this stage, I've been doing some consulting on remote work before the pandemic, maybe it was about 10% of my work.

But ever since the start of the pandemic, that was the overwhelming majority of my work with hydro consulting and decision making in hybrid work and remote work, how to return to the office, how to lead hybrid teams, I have 24 companies by now transition to the future of work, ranging from top 200 100 fortune 500 companies whose names your digital recognize to the middle market companies of 100 people and everything in between. And I came up with a book called returning to the office and leading hybrid remote teams, which became a best seller and which is why the New York Times interviewed me and Rob brought up my profile as the office whispered hybrid expert. So that's my background. That's what I focus on.

Jason Weber
3:40 
Outstanding. So it sounds like you definitely you have the the academic pedigree you have the real life type, vibe and experience for this. And it sounds like this has created a perfect storm of opportunity for you. So I've read your bio, I've I've seen your research interests. And to be honest, I couldn't be more excited to hear your thoughts on some of these following questions, because these all kind of dance in the same sphere that I'm interested in researching. And so of course, Dr. Rawlings is let me kind of take lead on this because I'm just I'm really pumped up to hear your views on this. So let's let's dive right in. What are some of the main challenges that managers are going to face when leading hybrid meetings or meetings with a fully remote team

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky
4:36 
when they're thinking so let's take those step by step because a hybrid meeting is very different to the fully remote meeting. So fully remote meeting is when everyone is dialing in remotely. So we can put a pin on that and put that aside because there's a lot of other issues you want to do with a hybrid meeting. So hybrid meeting is when there's some people in the room and some people who are coming in remotely and Biggest challenge with that the number one challenge is making sure that the people who are remote are not second class citizens. That is the biggest challenge challenge number one that managers have to face.

Unfortunately, what often happens is that they kind of end up ignoring the people who are coming in remotely. So if you think about a typical meeting, without the people coming in remotely, everyone is in the room. And the manager already has kind of a tough time managing the people in the room, right? Notoriously, meetings tend to run over time, and meetings tend to not get everything done that they want to accomplish. Now, you have a completely additional challenge on top of everything else. So there are some people in the room. But there are some people who are coming in remotely. And they're having completely different experience than the people who are coming in the room. So now, if a manager is managing the meeting, the manager she or he has to not only manage the meeting of the people in the room, but also manage the experience of the people who are coming in from outside the room or coming in remotely. And there's lots of things talk about technology.

But the human side, the human factors, the decision making, which is a key area of expertise, is what's at stake, because managers already tend to be cognitively overloaded in a typical meeting. Now they're even more cognitively overloaded with a whole different element and set of issues that they have to manage. So that is the crux of the challenge that the facilitator after the meeting who tends to be the manager is overloaded. And as a result, the people who are coming in remotely tend to have a second class experience. And so that is the crux of the challenge. We'll be talking about how to address it. But that's the crux of the challenge.

Jason Weber
6:47 
Okay, very, very interesting, very interesting. Now, in your book, that is, it's a best seller. And the whole thing can really just, you could pick any page or any chapter of this, and you know, follow it to the tee, it's phenomenal. In your book, returning to the office and leading hybrid and remote teams, you discuss how many leaders rely on traditional office centric collaborations. And you note how this is detrimental? Can you offer some tips on on overcoming this trap? And I certainly don't want to take anything away from the book, because I know you talked about this extensively, but just for our listeners, can you offer some tips on how to overcome that that specific element that you call out?

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky
7:41 
Sure. So we can start with the hybrid meeting and expand outward. So the hybrid meeting, the intuition of the manager, the office centric methodology is to focus on the people in the room natural, because they're in front of you, you can focus on and you can connect with them, the thing that they don't realize they need to do is if if there was no facilitator, if there was nobody else, then the people who are in the room would still get a great experience, they can talk to each other. Instead, what the meeting leader needs to do is to focus on the experience much more of the people who are outside the room.

And that is completely out of the typical office based experience. So they need to focus on the experience of the people outside the room, they need to facilitate them being a participant, they need to focus on their chat, and they're using emojis, making sure that they can participate and that they can make their voice heard. So if they type something in the chat, they need to voice that in the meeting, they need to make sure that there are no side conversations in the room, that the people who are coming in remotely can't hear a best practice is to have everyone who's in the room, open up their laptop, so that all the phases can be seen.

And that they can see if they're talking to someone on the side that's still observable and visible to the people who are coming in remotely. So that's just some examples of how you change the experience. And make sure that in that specific instance, when we're talking about hybrid meetings, that people in the room are not quite as privileged, and they don't have as much of a first class citizen experience as the people compared to the people who are coming in remote. So that's just one example. Let's go to hours. Another example is how do you make sure people are productive? Now Microsoft research that Microsoft did a lot of research on what they call productivity paranoia. They found that 87% of managers have trouble believing that their employees are being productive when they're working remote. We'll repeat that that's 87% Don't trust their workers to be working productively for the product. Typically when they're working remote, wow, that's, that's huge, right. But when you look at the research and your research base guy and getting a PhD, you know that, in reality, people who are working remotely are quite a bit more productive than the people who are working in the office.

And that makes a lot of sense why that's the case, right? They don't have to do the commute. And people are willing to devote about 40% of the time that they're not commuting to doing work. They can also not distracted by all the people walking around them. They can do their head down work, they can do reports, programming, trading, typing, working on their emails, whatever. They are not distracted by others doing video conference calls around them. And they don't have to worry about distracting others when they're doing video conference calls. And they can also work whenever their energy levels are highest. So some people are mourning dove, some people are night owls.

And some people are in the middle. So that's the chronotype. They morning, evening, and neither chronotype. So whichever way you phrase it, that is something that people are, it's important to people. And so for these reasons, as well as others, people are more productive, overwhelmingly working remotely. Now managers just don't look clearly they're not looking at the data. They're using the office space methodology of managing, which is what, which is management by walking around, you've probably heard that phrase. And so that's the management style that managers use. And if they're walking around, they're not seeing these remote workers. Well, there's their perception, their intuition is that they're not working, even though the research and the evidence very much shows that they're working.

And so there are a lot of techniques that you need to that you can use to align and coordinate managers with their employees on how to ensure that managers can coordinate can be coordinated and can trust that their employees are being productive when they're working remotely. But it's not going to work if you impose office based methodology of hybrid work. And that doesn't mean that the office is not useful. I want to be very clear, I recommend that for my clients overwhelmingly have a hybrid first model, but they shouldn't fool themselves and think that the office is for productivity, individual productivity, that's not what it's for individual productivity, for most large majority of people is much higher at home. The office is for very important activities, like more intense synchronous forms of collaboration, for mentoring and other job training for nuanced conversations about performance, about conflicts about strategy for socializing, and team building.

Those are all very high stakes, high value activities, they just don't take up that much time. You know, they take up something like an average 15% 10% 20%, depending on your role, have an average Workers Day. So those are really important activities. But two, they're not high time activities, the time that's mostly taken up is by doing individual work, head down work programming, like I mentioned, doing asynchronous communication, like email, doing video conference calls, phone calls, and so on. That's like 85% of a typical workers time. So that's a good breakdown for people to spend maybe 80 to 85% of the time in, working in their home, where they can be more productive.

And something like 20 15% of time. So maybe one day a week in the office, maybe two days if you can't easily distributed in the office, when they do those very high value, high stakes, collaborative conversation, mentoring, activities, socializing. So that's another factor, just asking what is the Office for and making sure that you do the activities in the office that are best done in the office, and that you minimize people's commuting time, so that they can be most productive, that's just very clearly going to be something that most contributes to the bottom line of a company.

Jason Weber
13:52 
So I really love how that first tip, you kind of call it out there is about focusing on the overall experience of the the hybrid worker and how that that first tool you give, in essence, is to be empathetic towards those individuals that aren't in the office, because like you mentioned, it's kind of easy to see that, oh, I don't see them. So they must not be here, they must not be productive, or whatever the case is.

So I love how you just kind of jumped out and said, Hey, focus on the experience of these hybrid remote workers and take the experience of the in person, individual and bring that to the same level. That's, I think that's absolutely phenomenal. And I also like how you teased out the element that in that hybrid work type setting, it really maximizes the efficiency of the employee being productive, which at the end of the day, ideally is what organizations want. They want their employees to be the most productive. So that was great. I really love that.

Thank you that that kind of dovetails into the third question here. Some employees who prefer working remotely may feel there are no advantages to those in person meetings, which you kind of alluded to, what would you say to those employees who feel, man, why do I, why do I want to go into the cubicle farm? Why do I even want to go into the brick and mortar spot.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky
15:27 
So I have a lot of research that people if there are some people who are working full remotely and other people who are working in a hybrid modality, who are coming into the office occasionally on the same teams, in the same roles, that people who will be working remotely will have worse relationships overall with their colleagues. And they will not be as connected, they will also be not be as likely to be promoted, and they will not be as likely to get as much mentoring.

And they won't have a good relationship with their supervisor, so that they are going to be more productive. So individually, yes, of course, like I said, there'll be more productive, they will get more stuff done. But they will have worse relationships worse collaboration, and be less likely to be promoted is less likely to be mentored. So those are the those are the trade offs. And in unless your whole company is fully remote, that trade offs are generally for most people are not going to be worth it if they wish to be promoted in the company, if they wish to stay in approximately the same role. Or if they wish to be promoted along the technical track, meaning not promoted into leadership track, have not promoted into kind of being a manager, but just keep going keep doing something that's dependent on your technical proficiency.

So for example, if you're a programmer, and you never want to go into management, you don't care about being a Team Lead, you just want to do programming. And that's fine, you'll be able to advance your career, you'll be able to learn independently, you'll not be need as much mentoring, perhaps you'll still lose something by not getting mentored. But there are ways of it need to put more effort into it. But there are ways of getting mentoring remotely, and learning things remotely, you can do that. It'll take more effort. So you can advance along that technical track. I'm working right now, for example, with a large professional services, consulting firm, whose name everyone knows, and we are trying to communicate to the fellow consultants, the consultants, so I'm helping them figure out their hybrid work plan.

And one of the things that might help them realize they're communicating out to their team members is that, hey, if you want to proceed along the technical track, just want to be in the IT consulting, meaning not the management, but just the consultant, service delivery, it's great for you to just stay remote. If you want any hope of being promoted into management, you're going to be much less likely to do so if you stay fully remote, because you won't have those relationships, you won't have collaboration you won't have mastering, you won't have as much leadership, you won't have as much sponsorship, those things are really remote for your career development if you're hoping to go up the career chain in a managerial role.

Jason Weber
18:14 
Excellent. Okay. Thank you for clarifying and kind of teasing that out. I appreciate that. Because a number of managers who have to have that conversation with hybrid or remote employees. Usually that's one of the first things that jumps out is those employees who have gotten used to working in a hybrid type format, or fully remote, it's back, why do I want to go back to the office or the cube farm? So thank you. Thank you for teasing that out. My My final question, kind of deals with elements that contribute towards success?

What are the key factors that leaders must consider to lead an effective hybrid meeting because I think that you are familiar with and all of our listeners are familiar with the joys of conducting meetings, and what it's like when that meeting is not successful or effective. So if you could kind of jump in a little into what are some of those key factors leaders must consider to lead an effective hybrid meeting? That would be great.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky
19:21 
Sure, so kind of building off on what we talked about earlier, empathizing with the experience of the people who are involved, because you'll naturally empathize with the people who are in the room. So really focusing deliberately and empathizing with their experience. That means several things. So first of all, the technology, you want to make sure that people who are coming in remotely can see everyone who very clearly and can see when when they're talking.

That means as I mentioned before, having everyone bring their laptop and open it and so that they're all looking at each other so that everyone, people on the roadmap and still see each other over the laptops. But the people who are coming in remotely can see everyone who is in the room. And so you can easily see who is speaking, that's not an intuitive thing to do, you have to overcome some habits. I remember, with companies how especially, you have to really make sure that the higher level leadership is modeling this behavior, because they are the people who have the most hassle, they often tend to be the ones who are less technically savvy, and less used to carrying around their laptops into meetings.

So definitely, if it makes, you know, get on top of them and make sure they're doing it, but once they start doing it, the we want to promulgate it for our organization, make sure that everyone does them. Once you do that, you also want to make sure to appoint someone, the manager, the facilitator needs to appoint someone in the room who's going to facilitate the experience of the people who are coming in remotely, who is not the manager, whoever is leading the meeting. So you want somebody to help you to assess you, because you're already cognitively highly loaded. And so that person needs to take on the role of, hey, when people who are remote, want to have a point while people in the room are having an excited conversation, you need to be able to interrupt the people in the room at an appropriate point.

And make sure the person people are coming in remotely quarterdeck remotely, are able to make their voice heard even in those excited back and forth that people are having inside a meeting which is so frequent common, right? That's one of the difficulties really difficulty of interrupting that excited back and forth, which you really need to do when you're the facilitator of the people who are coming in remote. And then you want to make sure that sidebar conversations are happening as much as possible within chat. So having people who are there in the room, use the chat feature to chat to each other. So that people who are remote can actually hear what's happening and see what's happening. Not simply kind of observe that there's a sidebar conversation going on that they can't hear, right, that's not great.

So and then you want to make sure that people who are outside of the room are trained and that the people who are inside the room are also trained on how to engage with emojis. So mochi is in the same way that you if you are in the room, you could see people's expressions. You could see them smiling, frowning, engaging, disengaging, being surprised, whatever, that's an important nonverbal communication. So for the nonverbals of the people outside the room, those are emojis, and you need to train them on how to use emojis appropriately. And you need to make sure that people in the room are trained on responding to the emojis and ideally using emojis to convey their emotions and their expressions about whatever has been set.

Jason Weber
22:49 
So I really, I really like how, in essence, to kind of capture and wrap up what you just said, ensure that everybody can be seen and be heard. And it's amazing that you know, even as far as we've come with technology with organizational leadership and management, it all kind of boils down to those two key elements be seen and be heard. So I really like that. Dr. glib, I gotta say, this has been an informative and really a great conversation. It's an area that I of course, I'm very passionate about with my research. Are there any closing thoughts that you would like to leave with our listeners as we get ready to wrap this up?

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky
23:36 
So I think the most important question in a hybrid setting is something I mentioned earlier, what is the Office for? Leaders really need to think about this and decide it and use the research to inform themselves on what is the office actually for why they need to come to the office? And what is the experience going to be like when people come into the office versus the ones who are staying at home, you want to make sure that you structure your company in such a way that you maximize the bottom line outcomes. So that means people are going to be most productive on their individual tasks at home, which that's the overwhelming majority. I mean, there's going to be some exceptions of people don't have a good at home setup.

So you want to give them flexibility to work in office, but the large majority will be more productive at home if they don't have a super distracting environment. And the office should be for collaborative activities for training, socializing, mentoring, nuanced conversations, again, high value activities, but doesn't spend much time. And so thinking about that, going from that outcome of what is the Office for with the goal of the business outcomes, right? How do you maximize productivity, engagement, collaboration, all with the end outcome of serving your clients most effectively because people are your staff are most productive, most collaborative, you have a good trade off outcomes on various factors. That's how you really want to be thinking about when to come to the office when If not come to the office, how to structure your hybrid policy effectively.

Jason Weber
25:05 
Excellent. Excellent. Thank you for that. And, of course, a key piece of information. We've mentioned a couple of times your best selling book, returning the office and leading hybrid remote teams, where can our listeners get this epic instruction manual on how to engage in this kind of leadership?

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky
25:27 
I can get us wherever you want, you can go to Amazon, you can go to Barnes Noble, it will be available on my website, which is disaster avoidance experts.com, forward slash hybrid. So disaster avoidance experts.com, forward slash hybrid. So it's easy enough, just type in return the office and leaving hybrid minimal teams, and you'll find it on Google.

Jason Weber
25:49 
Excellent. And also, how can our listeners connect and engage with you

Speaker 2  25:55 
on highly available on LinkedIn, so my name is gloved support ski. So LinkedIn is great. And then you can just check out my website, disaster avoidance experts.com. There's a contact form there, you can contact me there. I look forward to hearing from you.

Jason Weber
26:11 
That is wonderful. And might I compliment you on your website? Because I don't think there's ever been a more accurate name for a website disaster avoidance experts. It's great. Help. Thank you. Dr. Glover has been a pleasure chatting with you. Thank you for joining us today in support of the Center for the Advancement of virtual organizations. We truly appreciate your insights and know our listeners have benefited today from your experience.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky
26:42 
I really appreciate you inviting me Jason, thank you very much.

Jason Weber
26:45  
Excellent. Until next time, I'm your host Jason Weber sitting in for Dr. Melody Rawlings. This has been challenges and best practices of leading hybrid and remote teams. Thank you very much.