Remote/Hybrid Facilitation and Participation: Taking it to the Next Level

This post was co-written by Berto Ceballos, Igor Kanshyn, and Christina Liu.

As of this writing, many of us have been navigating work with remote team members for the better part of three or more years. We may have gotten better at it, but there is still plenty of room for improvement; and unfortunately, some employers’ patience has worn thin. Thus, the pendulum of corporate tolerance for these non-traditional team and work arrangements is starting to swing back, as frequent headlines blare out the latest companies to announce incentives, terminations, restrictions, or crack-downs on remote work.

Before we start elaborating on remote facilitation ideas and tactics, let's think for a moment about a less technological example. Imagine you are in a house with a backyard, the weather is great and you need to decide whether to serve dinner inside or eat outdoors. Eating outdoors provides a number of great benefits—more space, fresh air, the ability to enjoy nature, kids would be thrilled, etc. With these lovely offerings, many of us would choose to have dinner in the fresh air. But in order to get that expected pleasing experience, some extra planning, efforts, and perhaps equipment are required. Choosing disposable paper plates might allow an unexpected gust of wind to blow them and some food off the table. Fresh air is nice and refreshing, but it will also cool down any hot dish much faster than if it were in the house. Have you checked the weather forecast? The rain might be an unwelcome partygoer. At the same time, the rain is not a problem if you have a gazebo. Is there a chance that mosquitoes are out for the hunt? This is not a problem if you have mosquito repellent or have a net or screens installed. As you can see, we have listed some challenges and mitigation tactics to fully benefit from a dinner outdoors. Ultimately, we can always eat outside, we just need to come prepared. The same is important for successful remote facilitations. Extra planning, efforts, tools, and training will let us fully benefit from the convenience and flexibility of remote and hybrid teams. 

With this post, we at VMware Tanzu Labs hope to help you improve your understanding of the WHY behind the various challenges of remote and hybrid work, so that you can seek out and try better solutions, avoid ineffective rote replication, and ultimately equip yourself for whatever combination emerges in your future teams.

What have we figured out and formed assumptions about?

Let’s recap many of the learnings and recommendations around remote and hybrid work that have accumulated over the past few years—many of which have been previously shared through our very own VMware channels and publications:

• We’ve learned that remote and more flexible work arrangements alleviate stress and the time-waste associated with commuting, health, or interpersonal concerns, which can help reduce burnout and improve access to talent from diverse demographic groups. 
• However, we have also discovered that this can come at the cost of having more siloed and isolated workers who feel both less connected to their team’s culture and more taxed by blurred work-life boundaries. 
• Our own studies have illuminated that it is necessary to be mindful of timezone spread when assembling remote teams—project and team health can suffer with higher timezone distribution.
• To serve as a home base or virtual water cooler for casual chatter to occur between team members, remote teams need to create intentional, unstructured time and space for meeting and/or chatting.
• It is vital for remote teams to be explicit about expectations, whether it be around communication tools to be used, the daily routine folks will follow, or any general agreements about how team members work with one another.
  • One suggestion for setting expectations is to create a chart to visually align and clarify when there are core working hours or key alignment meetings for the team—ideally, something that everyone can literally see, on a shared virtual board or document.
  • Another favorite activity we at Tanzu Labs like to conduct with teams is the Personal User Manual, a way to better understand one another’s working styles and preferences.
• With remote teams, building culture often takes more time, and collaborative work (e.g., pair programming), writing or designing, can be more taxing. 
  • A way to combat this is to acknowledge and accommodate the need for more solo and restorative time than previously anticipated.
• Keep an eye on team health with regular check-ins and use tools such as the Developer Efficiency Assessment to determine what additional measures can be taken to improve team performance.
• When and where possible, meet in person in order for the team to strengthen connections and collaborate flexibly. This can mean getting together at regular intervals, for bursts of collaborative activity, or at natural checkpoints throughout a project.

Equipped with this hard-won experience and understanding, organizations now hold mixed opinions and assumptions about the efficacy of remote and hybrid work, which underlie the debate about how strictly to enforce employees returning to the office . For example, many people have been in enough remote calls by now to have formed the belief that any attendee without their camera turned on is automatically disengaged and multitasking during the meeting. Others have perceived that the usual team-building rituals or regular cadence of meetings do not produce the same results as before, especially as more new and remote team members join, leading to the conclusion that physical proximity must be the missing ingredient.

It is important to assess such assumptions critically and arm ourselves for the possibility they may be invalid, and the certainty that not all organizations will have drawn the same conclusions going forward.

Love the participant, not the camera

Research published about a year ago in Switzerland highlights the importance of having cameras on during meetings. The scientists tested the concept of Social Presence Theory (SPT); which focuses on people making their personal characteristics more visible to the audience they communicate with. There is a direct connection between meetings with turned-on cameras and a high level of social presence. The study found that activated cameras allow video conference participants to experience greater levels of trust and rapport because of the presence of visible, verbal, and nonverbal cues. Cameras help create intimacy and immediacy, and increase understanding between communicating parties, which ultimately streamlines dialog and collaboration.

And yet, we all know by now that video meetings are tiring—a full day of them even more so than perhaps the same amount of meetings in person. A number of analyses in recent years has revealed trends in how different types of people respond to their camera and video presence in meetings. Notably, in one study, women and newer employees felt the fatiguing effects of video more keenly than other groups on the same remote calls. This can be attributable to the prevalence of gender or age differences, which can lead to stereotyping and the pressure such stereotypes exert on such participants. On a related note, women in another survey reported more difficulty speaking up in virtual meetings than men, and more difficulty than in face-to-face meetings.

Beyond simplistic gender or tenure groupings, researchers further identified five nonverbal mechanisms that predict Zoom fatigue. Specifically, they found that the more that participants felt the following, the greater Zoom fatigue they tended to experience:

• Other participants staring at them through the gallery view 
• Constrained in their physical setup relative to the camera 
• Concerned or distracted about seeing themselves in the virtual mirror 
• Aware of spending effort thinking about how to produce AND interpret nonverbal cues, such as body language and facial expressions

Individual personality traits such as extraversion and emotional stability were also factors in predicting Zoom fatigue, along with age—generally, respondents who were older, more extroverted, and more emotionally stable reported lower levels of fatigue.

With all of this in mind, we assert that equating the level of remote participant engagement with that participant’s presence on camera could be a form of unconscious bias that, at very least, discourages full contributions from diverse teams. Furthermore, if left unchecked, such a bias could harm an organization’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Leaders and facilitators of remote and hybrid meetings should be cognizant of the impact of video meetings, inviting and permitting cameras to be turned off when preferred by team members.

Be purposeful about how to meet

So when is it critical to have a team member’s video presence or more? In one large scale analysis, a number of common meeting capabilities and key meeting objectives were identified. It turned out that NOT all meeting capabilities were required to achieve all types of objectives.

At its most basic, a meeting needs to enable participants to hear one another’s voices, and potentially, access a shared screen or work space if they are to achieve any objectives together, synchronously. If the objective of a meeting is to have a real-time exchange of information and opinions, provide clarifications, or find solutions to a problem together, there isn’t really a need for video. (And, if the meeting objective is simply to disseminate information and collect feedback asynchronously, then, as the common saying goes, it really “could have been an email”). 

• Our own experience within Tanzu Labs shows this is especially the case when familiarity between the participants and with the domain has been established. As we often see when we’re heads-down with a client team working through the nitty-gritty of an activity on a Miro board or a backlog of user stories in Tracker—you’re so attuned to the work and the cadence of one another’s voices discussing the issue at hand that seeing one another’s faces is often an afterthought.

The ability to more quickly discern another participant’s subtle reactions to a topic becomes more important when a meeting’s objectives involve more sensitive subjects, relationship-building, commitment, or persuasion. Thus, when you’re trying to assemble a team, motivate teamwork, or generate buy-in and consensus on a decision, having video capabilities in order to see facial expressions, body language, or gestures enables a faster reading of the room, and to know what hurdles to alignment might still remain. 

• This is even more critical when the point of a meeting is to give feedback, exchange information meant to stay private or confidential, or to show personal concern—these more delicate situations invite a human touch and read of the situation that, yielded skillfully, help strengthen the relationship between participants.

If a meeting’s primary goal is to establish those initial relationships on a team, or to resolve conflicts and disagreements that have arisen between them, the above are prime examples of when participants need not only those physical body language and facial cues, but also want to confirm one another’s full engagement with the topic and substance of the discussion. These are the types of meetings worth spending extra time, travel, and effort required to get folks physically together in a room, or connected through full audio and video, or other telepresence capabilities.

Leveraging this analysis in reverse, if tensions are rising on your team over whether a certain meeting needs to even happen at all, let alone be in person or with cameras on, this may be due to a misalignment in the meeting’s perceived objectives. For example, should the daily standup meeting require a video call with cameras on? If some team members think daily standup is only for routinely reporting status information, while others see it as a key relationship-building ritual, the answers to that question will vary greatly.

When everyone was in the same office by default, these considerations did not have to be so explicit, as team relationship building came simply by being in one another’s presence. Now it behooves teams to be much more analytical and clear about which meetings are intended to achieve what objectives, in order to align participation expectations.

Replace what doesn’t happen organically 

Since well before the pandemic, we’ve known about the relationship between psychological safety and team performance, but more recent studies illuminate that cultivating this sense of security on remote and hybrid teams requires much more proactive effort and intentionality. There are fewer opportunities for bonds of trust to develop organically when team members are limited in their contact or ability to share experiences in different contexts, be it getting refreshments in the break area, heading towards lunch together, or departing at the end of day.

Internal surveys conducted by our own practitioners have highlighted that ad-hoc syncs were by far the facet most adversely affected by a lack of participation on remote teams. When we are separated, we are less aware of what one another is engaged in or struggling with. We no longer have the ability to know when might be a good time to tap someone on the shoulder for an immediate and quick gut check, adding friction in the growth of the team’s overall understanding of the work they are tackling together. When this work involves collective persuasion to some new ways of thinking, as it often does in our engagements with clients, this can further erode the sense of coordination and support that may be needed for particularly tough transformations.

For example, back when we were always in person in the same physical space, if a client team member demonstrated a strong reluctance to try pairing, or practice test-driven or cloud native development, all of us on the balanced team would have some sense of the struggle. Everyone could see that person typically leaning back at the pairing station, arms crossed, while the Tanzu Labs practitioner expended great effort to model inclusive behavior and keep them engaged. We would make sure to provide extra emotional support for that practitioner, and could swoop in with a little reinforcement as needed using a well-timed inquiry, answer, or informational update to help model the benefits of shared collective ownership or a rapid team feedback loop.

Once these pairing interactions moved to remote tools—out of one another’s view and unable to be casually observed—the harder it became to automatically be in sync and coordinated about what folks were wrestling with and how best to assist. Tanzu Labs teams ostensibly working together towards the same behavioral outcomes for the client team would feel less unified and as though everyone didn’t have one another’s backs, leading to frustration.

Thus, the implicit must become explicit on hybrid and remote teams. That is to say, rather than relying on folks to pick up on interaction cues through a video screen or over a flaky connection, teams should set aside time to officially discuss ground rules. Building upon our earlier findings and recommendations, teams should not only complete the Personal User Manual activity, but should also be clear about the following: 

• What are the tools the team will use for synchronous, asynchronous, short, or long-form communications? 
• Does everyone know how to use all of the features for customizing those tools to suit their own personal styles? 
• What are our shared goals and responsibilities, and what is our common code of conduct? 
• For teams with additional behaviors to influence or model, what is our collective strategy for persuading all key stakeholders and demonstrating best practices? Tactically, how will we regularly check in on our progress?

This level of intentionality applies to the building of interpersonal relationships on the team as well, a tone which can be set from the top. A 2021 analysis of leadership studies found that leaders who paid more attention to relationships—tending to aspects of the team’s mission, collegiality, and interpersonal engagements—exhibited a stronger positive effect on their virtual teams’ performance than leaders who were more focused on processes and procedures. It was especially evident that large teams led by such relationship-focused leaders tended to be more efficient and productive than those whose leaders were more task-focused.

Ultimately, it’s clear that managers who understand and enable that work time that also includes time when remote team members can be engaged in small talk, or generally just be social with one another, both strengthen a team’s culture and help improve its productivity.

In his book, Leaders Eat Last, Simon Sinek describes the anthropological and biological underpinnings for why humans require such social connection—it is to establish and strengthen a Circle of Safety that team members need to feel they are part of in order to perform at their best.

Try staying apart to improve working together

Those interpersonal bonds are difficult to create without meeting synchronously, and yet, meeting bloat is commonly understood to negatively affect team members’ well-being. Once a team has solidified their interpersonal connections, their sense of team culture, and belonging, it is valuable to consider what else can be done to increase team performance. One inspiration can be found in this study of organizations instituting meeting-free days: It showed that officially NOT meeting for particular days of the week actually improved team cooperation, communication, and engagement. Team members reported decreased levels of stress the more regular meeting-free days there were, as well as increased productivity and satisfaction, with self-reported peak levels at four meeting-free days per week. While this may seem paradoxical, it’s less so when you realize that meeting-free days directly contribute to a sense of autonomy, or an individual’s ability and agency to make their own decisions, including control over their personal schedule. The well-known Project Aristotle by Google documented the connection between autonomy and increased psychological safety, which is one of the key factors that makes teams successful.

There are other benefits to having days without any scheduled meetings, including a longer period where professional activities can be performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. The author and professor Cal Newport defined this concept of deep work in his book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Across the Tanzu Labs practitioner disciplines, this can translate into the following types of pursuits:

• Working with a paired team member to create, examine, or dissect something
• Coding and technical exploration
• Digesting and analyzing data
• Writing, designing, and developing fuller details of an initial idea

Even when getting together (remotely or physically) to collaborate, remember that shouting out whatever comes to the top of mind is not the most effective way to harness everyone’s creativity. Research has shown that group ideation can produce less diverse or effective ideas than individual ideation, since the processes involved in sharing ideas live can influence or stymie others in their own idea generation. Facilitation techniques that leverage the power of both divergent and convergent thinking, and even fully asynchronous ideation methods, can be more effective at producing the highest variety and quality of ideas.

This is why so many of our recommended practices for group idea generation meetings (e.g., 3-column retrospective, solution brainstorming, and design critique) start with a period of silent generation where individual participants can think deeply about their own concepts without being affected by others in the same space.

Supporting hybrid and remote teams regardless of your role

There is unlikely to be complete consensus or consistency any time soon as to how teams in the future will operate, even within the same organization. Will your team stay fully remote, or transition to being back in the office full time, or create a schedule that is a mixture of both? Changing organizational and individual circumstances will dictate which trade offs will be made and when.

In the meantime, whether you are in a position of being an organizational leader, an occasional facilitator, or simply a supportive team member and participant, here are some concrete ways you can support maximum flexibility on your teams:

• Before any meeting or workshop, consider your objectives and use those to determine what meeting capabilities you really need.
  • Is this an informational update that really could just be an email? 
  • Are there idea generation or response activities that could be done asynchronously?
  • Do you need to see all participants’ facial reactions the entire time? 
  • Are there points in the agenda when you might explicitly give folks permission to keep cameras off?
• Model, promote, and encourage multiple modes of participation as a norm for others on the team, maximizing inclusivity.
• Be relationship-minded and act with intention to build connections with team members, whether it be through informal small talk and check-ins, or more official activities.
• Make the implicit more explicit, so that all team members have the same common understanding of how to interact, behave, and operate.
• Gauge meeting effectiveness from all angles, and propose a meeting audit if you notice certain ones are lacking (e.g., could your team adjust and support having one or more meeting-free days, regularly?)

The best course of action for all of us is to increase our understanding of team dynamics and human behavior, while equipping our toolbox with updated tools and techniques for whatever lies ahead.