“One virtual, all virtual.”

Back on August 5, in New York Times’ DealBook, this little nugget ran:

Rethink meetings. ​​Instead of having in-office employees gather in a conference room while remote employees dial in, some companies are encouraging everyone to dial in separately on their laptop, regardless of whether they’re in the office.

I think it’s relatively fair to say that human beings have been trying to “rethink meetings” since meetings became a thing we did, and it would seem that COVID and the work aftermaths provided a perfect moment to do just that. I am not sure many organizations will actually shift the way they do meetings, and that’s largely because so much of work is about “that’s the way we do things” and change feels impossible, often.

This idea above, from DealBook, is similar to something that a guy I work with, Dr. David Rock, has proposed. He calls it “one virtual, all virtual.” To wit:

The idea is this: if you have even one person who works remotely, you design meetings and the general culture around everyone being virtual. And when you have a meeting, even if a few people are in the same location, they each and join the call virtually, different rooms. No one is clustered together.

Now think about inclusion and exclusion: If you’re at home, and see four people in a conference room laughing and…