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Hybrid Meetings in the Modern Workplace: Stories of Success and Failure

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Collaboration Technologies and Social Computing (CRIWG+CollabTech 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11677))

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Abstract

Hybrid meetings, in which co-located and remote participants connect via video or/audio, have become ubiquitous in the globalized modern workplace. Despite, or perhaps because of this ubiquity, conducting hybrid meetings is not straightforward. In this paper, we investigate the opportunities and challenges of hybrid meetings. We conducted a multi-site study of hybrid meetings in two global software companies in Europe, using participant observation, semi-structured interviews and video-analysis. Our findings show that there is a significant diversity in formats and requirements for hybrid meetings in different working environments. Further, hybrid meeting participants perceive and handle a range of both expected and emergent problems. While some problems can be attributed to difficulties or failures of technical infrastructure, others arise out of asymmetries of interaction and social and cultural context across the co-located and remote settings. We argue that managing these asymmetries is key to a successful hybrid meeting.

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Acknowledgements

Banu Saatçi’s work has been supported by Microsoft Research through its PhD Scholarship Programme in EMEA. We thank both companies and their employees for taking part in our research and anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback along with Christian Remy, Gökçe Elif Baykal, Midas Nouwens, Bjarke Vognstrup Fog, Cristian Roner and Kaya Akyüz for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Digital Design and Information Studies, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Banu Saatçi & Clemens Nylandsted Klokmose

  2. Computer Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Roman Rädle

  3. Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK

    Sean Rintel & Kenton O’Hara

Authors
  1. Banu Saatçi
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  2. Roman Rädle
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  3. Sean Rintel
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  4. Kenton O’Hara
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  5. Clemens Nylandsted Klokmose
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Banu Saatçi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Osaka University, Osaka, Japan

    Hideyuki Nakanishi

  2. University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan

    Hironori Egi

  3. University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Irene-Angelica Chounta

  4. Ritsumeikan University, Shiga, Japan

    Hideyuki Takada

  5. Otsuma Women’s University, Tokyo, Japan

    Satoshi Ichimura

  6. University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany

    Ulrich Hoppe

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Saatçi, B., Rädle, R., Rintel, S., O’Hara, K., Nylandsted Klokmose, C. (2019). Hybrid Meetings in the Modern Workplace: Stories of Success and Failure. In: Nakanishi, H., Egi, H., Chounta, IA., Takada, H., Ichimura, S., Hoppe, U. (eds) Collaboration Technologies and Social Computing. CRIWG+CollabTech 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11677. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28011-6_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28011-6_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-28010-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-28011-6

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