Suddenly Hybrid

Chapter 2Considering Meeting Modalities

With hybrid meetings defined, it's time to consider the current meeting environment. That is, what is the current “state of play” for meetings as the world recovers from the COVID‐19 pandemic? There are a lot of opinions out there about this, but we have something that you won't find anywhere else: actual data to help guide your decisions and actions as you adapt to the hybrid meeting. You should expect nothing less from a book cowritten by a meeting scientist.

Allow us to explain. By the fall of 2019, Joe had been studying meetings for more than a decade. However, he admittedly had not considered modality – virtual, face‐to‐face, hybrid, telephone – to a great degree, and when he did, the focus was on face‐to‐face meetings. After all, the face‐to‐face meeting was king in 2019, and pretty much forever before that. So, in September 2019, he decided to start studying virtual meetings, and a month later, he launched a survey of 1,000 knowledge workers across a broad range of organizations and industries in the United States.

It was terribly good timing, with an emphasis on the “terrible,” considering the things that followed in 2020. The events of that year presented a veritable treasure trove of data‐gathering opportunities to study the first major meeting disruption in modern history, and Joe took advantage of it. He already had the pre‐COVID‐19 data from that sample set of 1,000 people from the fall, so why not learn how they responded ...