You will be able to contribute well when you join by video while others sit together in a room.
It's a Thursday, which is your work-from-home day, and you've dialled into the weekly team meeting. Six people sit in the meeting room in Tanjong Pagar. You and one colleague in Manila are two small faces on the TV at the end of the table. You start to speak at the same moment as someone in the room, and the half-second audio delay means they win. By the time you try again, the topic has moved.
This happens in almost every hybrid team. The people in the room can see each other lean forward, catch an eye, hear a breath before someone speaks. You can't do any of that from a laptop, and they can't see you do it either. So the room, without meaning to, talks over the screen.
You can fix most of this yourself, with four habits.
In a room, people take turns using tiny signals. On a screen, those signals vanish. Talking louder only adds to the overlap, so replace the signals with ones the room can't miss.
Use the raise-hand button in Zoom or Teams. If the chair or someone in the room is watching the participant list, it works well. Many rooms don't watch it, so back it up with a short chat message: "Want to add something on the budget." That puts your intent in writing, and anyone glancing at the meeting chat will see it.
If nothing works and the topic is about to close, say the chair's name: "Kelvin, can I come in on this before we move on?" A name cuts through noise in a way a general "sorry, um" does not. Said calmly, it doesn't come across as rude, because you're asking, not grabbing.
When you want to speak, have your camera on. People respond to faces. A black square with your initials is easy to forget, and when a voice comes out of it unexpectedly, the room takes a second to realise who's speaking and often misses your first sentence.
Mute discipline matters too. Stay muted while others talk, so background noise doesn't distract anyone. But unmute just before you start, not as you start. Everyone has seen someone talk for ten seconds on mute, then repeat themselves, by which time the moment has gone. Finger ready on the key, unmute, short pause, speak.
Check your setup before the meeting rather than during it. A dim room, a laptop camera pointed at your chin or a noisy fan make you harder to listen to, and people tune out of what's hard to follow. A window in front of you and a cheap headset do more than any software setting.
The most reliable fix happens before the meeting. Send the chair a short message:
"Hi Kelvin, I'll be dialling in tomorrow. I have a point on the Q3 budget. Could you check in with the people online before closing that item?"
Most chairs say yes. Many simply haven't realised how hard it is to get in from the screen, because they always sit in the room. A request in advance also means the chair is now expecting your contribution, so they're more likely to notice your hand going up. If you chair meetings yourself, lesson 6.3, Chair the room and the screen, shows how to do this for others.
If remote people are regularly left out, raise it once with your manager as a team issue, not as a complaint about any one meeting. Something like "Online people find it hard to get in during the weekly meeting. Could we try going round the screen before each decision?" is easy to agree to.
Spoken words in a meeting vanish. If your contribution was half-drowned by the room's audio or squeezed in at the end, people may not remember it, and the note-taker may not have caught it.
So put your main point in the meeting chat as well, in one or two lines, either just before you speak or right after:
"Suggest we hold the vendor payment until the training dates are confirmed. They were 3 weeks late last year."
This gives your point a second life. People who missed it can read it. The note-taker can copy it. And if the decision goes your way, there's a record that you raised it. It also helps colleagues whose first language isn't English, or who joined from a noisy place, to follow what you meant.
Don't use the chat as a running commentary while others speak, which distracts people and can look like sniping. One clear line for your own contribution is enough. Keep it in the same point, reason shape from lesson 5.2, Make your point in under a minute.
You don't need to use all four habits at once. Look at your calendar for the next meeting where some people are in a room and you're not. Decide in advance which habit fits that meeting best, and which point you most want to land, so that when the moment comes you're not working out the technique and the content at the same time.
In your next hybrid meeting, use one technique from this lesson and write down whether your point was picked up.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).