Suddenly Hybrid

Chapter 3Lessons Learned from Our “Suddenly Virtual” Work Life

“Hey, we're two weeks into summer break!” Joe quipped on his “Family Zoom call” with the extended Allen clan on March 29, 2020. It wasn't the first video call with his family, but it soon became standard practice for Joe's family as well as countless other folks who found video calls to be a lifeline for connecting with loved ones when face‐to‐face interactions were off‐limits. Birthday parties, baby showers, practically every meaningful moment went virtual, and all of us made do. The real problems arose from spending both our personal and professional lives through a webcam, which led to a host of issues, including digital exhaustion, a lack of boundaries between work and home life, and a steep rise in mental health problems from anxiety to depression, just to name a few.

Hybrid meetings should help alleviate some of these woes, but only if we carefully consider how to avoid making the same mistakes we made when we were fully remote. The truth is that the work‐from‐home experiment taught us many things. During this time we (Joe and Karin), like so many others, worked from home, lived on our webcams, and tried to remain as productive as possible, but as a meeting scientist and communication expert, we also sought to make sense of the work‐from‐home situation, and accordingly, we learned quite a bit, which is the focus of this chapter.

In this chapter, we will explore:

• What happened to meetings when so many workers ...