Should we be in-person or virtual?

Navigating the Future of Meetings

Raise your hand if you’ve been in a virtual meeting over the past two years.  

Raise your hand if you have been in more than you can count.  

Raise your hand if you are longing to meet your colleagues in person, drink moderately tolerable coffee, nosh on stale pasties, dig into bold new strategies, or laugh in the evening over shared stories and personal experiences.  

Over the last year and a half, many organizations have committed to getting strategy development, decision making and - frankly - a lot of  work done remotely. This has meant video call after video call, with our computers becoming our one-stop-shop for engaging with colleagues locally and far away - regardless of the purpose of that engagement. But for many, that reality is now changing and we are navigating back to in-person spaces for meetings and planning. So does that mean everything goes back to in-person? How do we navigate that decision making process? 

At Impact by Design, we have now had the opportunity to collaborate closely with our partners both in virtual and in-person spaces to help teams achieve their goals.  We are excited to share what we’ve learned so you can help your team use both spaces as effectively as possible. 

Before we get into navigating this decision making, let’s take a look at some of the benefits and challenges associated with each space that we’ve identified through our work.

Weighing these benefits and challenges is an important part of making decisions about the way a meeting will be held, and you’ll be able to consider them most effectively when you are clear about the purpose of your meeting.

Here’s what you need to know: there are qualities of remote spaces that make them uniquely suited for tackling specific meeting purposes, while other (more complex) purposes are best suited for in-person engagement. 

What might that look like in practice?

• A virtual space is great for seeking broad input on or understanding of a topic. If your purpose requires it, take advantage of the ease of virtual convening to have experts share what they know about the topic so everyone has a similar level of baseline knowledge and can ask clarifying questions, or identify follow up resources to review on their own.

• Both virtual and in-person spaces can be appropriate for prioritization, such as which strategies to focus on, or which themes or problems might be critical to address . There are great structured prioritization tools that can guide these discussions remotely, but if time is of the essence, these processes are typically quicker when done in-person.

• In-person engagement is best suited for discussing sensitive topics, when needing to build trust or camaraderie among participants, or when making final decisions that deeply impact the participants and their work. These types of meeting purposes can be more challenging because navigating how people are feeling or receiving information in the moment, introducing new team members, or creating safe spaces that people can leave or come back to is critical for success. Navigating decision making in-person allows the participants to feel whether the room is really in full agreement about the path forward, as well as better identify challenges and opportunities that might arise in implementation.  

Here is the most exciting part. 

It’s never just one meeting, right? And you never just have a one-off workshop. 

Think about your recent experience working remotely. Did it feel like too many meetings? Meetings led to more meetings, and you needed another meeting just to prepare for the next one! 

Imagine embarking on the planning process for your next big workshop. You can now employ the amazing potential of virtual spaces to get your planning started and advance initial thinking, while saving in-person engagement for the most critical - and most complex - discussions. In practice, this means you are using the time of all involved as efficiently as possible. 

Of course, we cannot stress enough that all meeting purposes can be accomplished in both remote or in-person spaces. To achieve more complex purposes remotely, however, your meeting must be very thoughtfully designed (our Activities & Techniques for Great Remote Workshops training can help you out with that). 

The bright side of the past two years is that our lessons learned from virtual engagement have given many teams  the power of choice. Now meeting virtually is a good option and we can choose to take advantage of the best aspects of remote or in-person spaces in order to make every meeting and workshop feel as meaningful - and efficient - as possible. Now that is exciting.