Hybrid Times
In so many industries, the hybrid model has taken over. Here are some suggestions to help us deal with this brave new world.
During the height of the pandemic, our university opted to allow us to teach our classes in-person if we followed certain protocols (masks, social-distancing, etc.). I didn’t go into this profession to talk to a bunch of boxes while sitting in my pajamas all day—I opted to teach my classes in-person.
Without fail, I would get emails—to the tune of about one a week—from a student who had been diagnosed with COVID and who could not, thus, attend class in-person. I felt obligated to offer a virtual experience for these students.
I have to say, that doing this every day was actually quite challenging. Teaching college classes in-person can be challenging enough. You need to become super-expert on some topic, do a lot of reading, write exams, grade papers, meet with students outside of class, and more. Hey, I love it—but it is a lot of work.
Having to cater to both in-person and virtual students concurrently, I came to find, added substantially to the workload. At the start of class, I’d have to turn on the computer and login. It may sound silly, but for most of my in-person classes, I nearly never use the computer, so even this step is an add for me. Not only does it take time, but nowadays (for understandable reasons), there is a double-authentication process. So suddenly my phone is a required teaching item—a required teaching item that the university does not pay for.
Next, I’d have to log into the communication software such as ZOOM or, in our case, usually WebEx. This requires more logging in and more double authentication. I’d need the computer to have a camera, which is only true in some of our classrooms—and then spend time being like “can you see me OK? Can you see the board? Can you hear me OK?”
That would all take like a solid 10 minutes—and that’s after I got the process down to a science.
Note that this description of teaching in a hybrid format says nothing about the multiple instances in which “technical difficulties” reared its ugly head, wasting a good bit of highly valued class time.
During class, I tend to invite questions and discussion. Well when you teach in this hybrid mode, suddenly this process turns into a highly complex dance in which you find yourself checking the “online world” for questions as well as responding to questions of students who are in-person.
I came to find that this process felt like a lot of extra work with no extra compensation. Further, I felt like it was extremely hard to do my best work because a large proportion of my attention was spent on making sure that the online part of things was going smoothly.
Office hours are similar. I have always offered a call-in option during my office hours. But these days, I feel obligated to keep my WebEx room open on my computer and essentially have two lines of students: Students who are just outside in the hallway and students who are in my online waiting room. Usually it is like 50/50. And it is, despite my best efforts, always awkward! I’ll have a student walk into my office and just as they’re about to sit down, I have to break it to them: “I have an online student that I have next—please go back in the hallway…” In these Hybrid Times, young adults simply expect an online option. Just about always. And based on their experiences, this makes sense.
Students in college now went to high school during the pandemic. So many of them passed high school classes by sitting on their beds(sometimes playing Fortnite) while they were logged into their classes with cameras and microphones turned off.
These emerging adults had this experience foisted upon them. And now this mode of doing just about everything is kind of all they know. In a sense, they are the fish in the fishbowl. They don’t know what it was like in college before the pandemic. And, sadly, they never will.
I do a lot of event planning in my work, such as organizing the SUNY New Paltz Evolutionary Studies (EvoS) Seminar Series and, on many occasions, the annual conference of the NorthEastern Evolutionary Psychology Society, among several other events. For such events, it has essentially become required to offer a virtual option. What many people may not realize is that offering this option adds dramatically to the efforts needed to produce a quality experience. The issues that emerge are very similar to what is found in teaching in a hybrid format.
Problems associated with running such meetings in hybrid format run the gamut:
Login Troubles
We’ve all been there. You’re about to start your meeting, but first you have to login. You’ve done this a million times before. But for some reason, something is different. Your password is, for some strange reason, not working. Or maybe you forgot your phone and cannot do the double-authentication process. Etc.
Technical Difficulties
When it comes to technical difficulties, login issues are the tip of the iceberg. I had a computer just die one time in the middle of showing a documentary on the evolutionary psychology of running to about 200 people from all over our community. Sometimes you get locked out of your account. Or locked out of multiple accounts! Because these days, we all have like hundreds of accounts, each with their own passwords and password protocols, etc. Maybe you can’t figure out how to share screen or record or chat or hide speaker notes or…well, it could be anything! Perhaps you need to call the tech office at your work and it goes straight to voicemail—and so forth. We’ve all been there. In the Hybrid World that surrounds us, this all is par for the course.
Diverted Attention
When I’m running a hybrid meeting of any kind, my attention capacity is automatically reduced. Paying attention to the in-person situation and to the online situation concurrently is like cooking an elaborate coconut chicken recipe on the stove while you’re baking a blackberry pie in the oven. You have to tend very carefully to both and they each have their own unique requirements. Now add that you need to sound smart, compassionate, and engaging the whole while!
A Two-Tiered Status System
Here is the dirty little secret of hybrid meetings: The in-person people are necessarily given more attention. Being at a hybrid meeting as the virtual attendee is just not as good—and we all know it! In effect, there is something of an implicit two-tiered status system in a hybrid meeting, with the in-person folks generally having more opportunities to participate and get the most out of the meeting.
… and more…
Suggestions for Living in Hybrid Times
I like to problem-solve. And with that said, this piece comes not only with a summary of the problems of the new normal, which we may call “Hybrid Times,” but it also comes with some suggested solutions. As follows:
A New Kind of Job
As the workplace is rapidly changing, many kinds of jobs are clearly on the way out. Toll collectors in New York State have recently been replaced by machines, as an example. A lot of people, in fact, hold jobs that simply will not exist some years from now.
So there will be a need for new kinds of jobs. Perhaps one new kind of job could be a hybrid-meeting coordinator. When I’m teaching a class with a hybrid element, it would be fantastic to have someone taking care of the logistical and technical details. Someone whose charge partly was to make sure that the people in the “online world” are getting as much as possible out of the meeting. Meanwhile, having someone dedicated to this work would allow the person running the meeting to focus on the content at-hand rather than on the technology.
At some point in teaching with the hybrid model, I asked an in-person student to use their laptop in a volunteer effort to help communicate with the students in the online world. This idea turned out to be very effective. I think this kind of job should be formalized as we advance in these Hybrid Times.
Perhaps there is even a niche for companies that help other organizations smoothly run hybrid events.
Supporting the Production of Video Recordings
Sometimes, it’s just better for someone to watch a recording of an event. For instance, for my Statistics classes, during the pandemic, I came to produce videos of me delivering the content for each chapter of the book. I made sure that the videos were high in quality and covered all aspects of what was covered in the in-person class. Armed with this content, I was able to stop teaching some classes in a hybrid manner and was able to just point students toward the videos. They were appreciative.
Of course, I hired someone to produce the videos and paid them out of my own pocket (I couldn’t even imagine asking the university to help with this financially—our university, like universities around the world, was struggling mightily in terms of finances during the pandemic).
Hiring people who help to produce these kinds of videos can address the Hybrid Times problems by creating more contexts where meetings are unimodal—thus putting all attendees on the same footing and allowing the person delivering the material to focus on the content at hand. But this kind of thing is going to require money and new kinds of jobs.
More Inclusive Interfaces for Hybrid Events
The inclusivity of systems such as ZOOM or WebEx are actually quite impressive. But they are also limited. When we have hybrid meetings for the Evolutionary Studies Program, for instance, the online audience is clearly diverted in so many ways. More than half of people opt to not have their cameras on, so we don’t even know what they are doing. And many of the others are clearly paying less attention than they would be if they were sitting right there.
And the feeling is completely different. Speaking to 200 people live is a very engaging experience. Speaking to 20 people live and 180 people via WebEx—often with their cameras off is, well, to be understated, not as engaging of an experience.
Somehow or another, the technology on this still has a way to go so as to reduce this inherent two-tiered status system.
Online-Only and In-Person-Only Events
Separating events as either online-only or in-person-only, when feasible, can, to my mind, be a very useful approach. The culture of hybridizing everything is something that we can, perhaps, push back against a bit. I would much rather run or attend an all in-person meeting or an all-online meeting than a hybrid meeting—for all the reasons described above. Perhaps building norms that prioritize meetings that are, simply, one or the other can help us all reap the benefits of such unimodal meetings.
Bottom Line
The dust is still settling on all this. We still have the opportunity to shape our future.
Young adults today spent their formative years under pandemic conditions. They are used to doing just about everything online (shopping, dating, hanging out with friends—EVERYTHING!). They don’t know what it is like to be in an all in-person college experience because they never experienced that before. So they simply don’t know.
I’d say that leaders in all kinds of industries need to think about this critical moment in time and work to build systems and norms that underscore meeting and teaching processes that work well and that steer away from meeting and teaching processes that are the result of clunky solutions to the pandemic, such as hybrid meeting, which, for a broad array of reasons, often lead to reductions in product quality.
Our young generation was raised with the internet their whole lives (see Twenge et al., 2019). Twenge and her colleagues documented a multitude of problems that result from this fact. And this was all before the pandemic—it is now like 1,000 times worse!
It’s up to members of the older generations to help steer things in a way that brings back past ways of doing things (such as non-hybrid meetings) that proved to work over large expanses of the human experience.
Hopefully the suggestions included here are helpful in at least nudging the needle in this brave new world. The Hybrid Times are upon us, everyone. There is no going back. That said, let’s shape the way that we do things as best we can before the dust settles. For the good of the next generation.
References
Twenge, J. M., Cooper, A. B., Joiner, T. E., Duffy, M. E., & Binau, S. G. (2019). Age, period, and cohort trends in mood disorder indicators and suicide-related outcomes in a nationally representative dataset, 2005-2017. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 128, 185-199.
Thank you to my brilliant fiance Shannon for very thoughtful discussion that led to this article!