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Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. In today's hybrid work world, how many of you have had an experience like this? You're joining a meeting from home, but a number of your coworkers are there in person. There's a conversation happening in the room, but it feels a little distant. You're only catching maybe every other word you feel invisible. Might as well just close your laptop and leave no one will notice anyway, or conversely, you've decided to attend a hybrid networking event in person with hopes of fostering deeper connections at work.
Great, but the organizers keep talking into the computer screen and referencing a chat that you're not privy to.
Now they're moving into breakout rooms in Zoom while you are left to fend for yourself in person. Incredibly frustrated, with little thoughtfulness though we can avoid creating situations where our guests feel invisible and frustrated while attending our hybrid gatherings. Here to tell us some more of what we should consider is Priya Parker, conflict facilitator and author of The Art of Gathering. Priya joining us these few days this week for short segments at the end of our show to continue on mini-series on gatherings in today's world. Hey, Priya welcome back.
Priya: Thanks for having me, Brian.
Brian: What are some things, guidelines that you have, for officers that are trying to do hybrid meetings like the ones I just described?
Priya: As you were very accurately describing, and perhaps your listeners are cringing as you're describing that chat box, hybrid gatherings are a mess. They're clunky. We are navigating this invented forum that while there were definitely communities experimenting with two different communities at the same time, one in person, one virtually, or online before the pandemic. Church services have experimented with this. It's not an entirely new idea, but it has become the primary forum, particularly in the workplace for us to figure out how to meet.
The biggest mistake we make around our hybrid gatherings is we assume that they are one gathering, and actually, they're three. They're three simultaneous gatherings. You have the in-person group, so perhaps the group in the boardroom or the conference room or at the wedding or in the mosque, whatever the context is. You have the people zooming in, and I'm using Zoom as a forum. You have the people in the Zoom if you will, the virtual experience and then you have if you choose the interstitching or the interconnecting of the two different groups.
A hybrid gathering is much more complex than either an in-person or an online gathering. We can do them well, but you first have to begin to realize that actually there is a lot going on here.
Brian: In your newsletter on the topic, you write that we should decide the center of gravity of the event based on ratios of attendees in person and online. How do we do this without undervaluing, whichever the minority is, and sacrificing their experience of the event?
Priya: The first thing to begin when to become a better gatherer is to first pause whether virtual, whether in person, or whether hybrid. First ask, what is the deepest need here for this group? Why are we gathering? The facilitator, Ray [unintelligible 00:03:44] has this great chart in a Harvard Business Review piece last year, where she has basically this premise where the more complex emotionally or intellectually the subject matter, particularly at work, the more we benefit from being in-person.
The first thing to do is ask what is the purpose of this meeting or this gathering? Given that purpose, do we want to try to have people be in person, or is virtual fine, or do we do the two? The second in terms of the center of gravity is to given that purpose-- let me give an example. I was speaking with a manager who had a first board meeting in eight quarters in person, and the majority of the board members could come in person, but there were three who couldn't for various reasons. Because they hadn't fully thought through this, how to do this hybrid gathering in the name of equity, they all zoomed in.
You had nine people in a room all going into their laptops for this meeting and left incredibly frustrated for traveling all the way to actually do what they could have done otherwise virtually. In that case, given the dynamics of the room, given the complicated conversations, you don't have to mute over each other. They should have realized that the center of gravity was in the room and meaningfully engaged the people virtually, but that doesn't mean that everyone has to get online the entire time in order to have an effective gathering.
Brian: Is it different for the business world than for the personal world? You were just talking about business meetings, but also you mentioned that people sometimes have online weddings now, or hybrid weddings in person and for a Zoom audience as well, or Passover Seders, or so many other kinds of gatherings. You mentioned church services. Is it different in the social setting than in the business setting in terms of how to approach it for the most success for everybody?
Priya: The principles are the same. First, think about why are you actually doing this. Why are you gathering? Given that, who do you want to have there? If there are going to be people who are either virtual or in-person to really ask how do we meaningfully connect and how do we meaningfully engage both groups? The second is to assign a facilitator or a host to be in charge of each of those separate experiences. In my newsletter, I write about this wedding that occurred in May 2020. It was a wedding I attended, It was supposed to be an in-person wedding. Elaine and Jonathan were going to get married in San Diego, in California in person.
The pandemic hits, that plan goes out the window. They end up having a stoop wedding in Brooklyn on the front stoop. They invite six neighbors, six friends who could physically walk to their location. They had chalk circles in six feet apart if you remember all the way back to that period in time, but then they invited a hundred guests, more than a hundred guests. Guests actually, who weren't invited to the in-person wedding because they didn't have to feed them, they didn't have to travel. They could expand their guest list.
One of the things that they did so brilliantly was they understood that both groups didn't have to have the same experience, and they meaningfully connected the folks in the Zoom as simple as before the ceremony, the groom Jonathan came over and just opened the laptop and said hello. Looked at all of his guests on Zoom. As he looked at them, he burst into tears because he was so overwhelmed to actually-- he intellectually knew they were there. He didn't actually realize, Oh my gosh, my loved ones are here. Then we all burst into tears, and it was this beautiful moment that can otherwise be missed.
It's not rocket science, but even as simple as if you have an in-person gathering, whether it's for a church service or a memorial or a wedding or a meeting, to think about the different moments the groups need to be acknowledged and interconnected, but they don't all have to have the same experience at the same time because--
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Brian: At the same exact moment. That's such a wonderful story about them going over and talking right to the camera. I think one of the things that happens too often with the hybrid meetings is that the camera is too far from the people in the physical room. That makes the people on Zoom feel remote when if you manage some close-ups, even if it's just cameo close-ups like you just described, it'll make everybody feel more connected. All right. Well, there we leave it for today with Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering the book and the newsletter, and she's going to be back tomorrow for another take on this. Thank you so much.
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