Suddenly Virtual

CHAPTER 14Embracing the Hybrid Meeting: The Converged Perspective

As the pandemic prompted a sudden shift to virtual meetings and remote work, many started to think about the look of the new or next normal. Some thought that gatherings of people would never be the same. Some argued that the shift to remote showed corporations that they may not need to spend all that money on office buildings. Still others like us started to think about the likelihood that humans will always be human, and fighting human nature is generally futile in the long run. In other words, humans are social creatures.

Citing Maslow's “Hierarchy of Needs,” it is generally agreed that humans have psychological needs of belongingness and love (Maslow 1943). This means that one of the more basic needs for all humanity is the need to have friends, intimate relationships, and so forth. For that to occur, we must gather. We must connect and we must fulfill that need. Otherwise, additional and other more complex needs will not have the potential to be met.

When we consider this idea in terms of our suddenly remote world, it is unsurprising that organizations started exploring another shift: the shift from fully virtual to hybrid. Recall that in earlier chapters we defined a hybrid meeting as one in which some people are in one room connecting virtually with others in another room or rooms across distance. Obviously, we'd recommend videoconferencing for the connecting, but the point here is that there are people ...