Abstract
Bridging the physical distance between remote locations, video mediated interaction has long been an integral part of workplace activities. Hybrid meetings are instances of video-mediated interaction combining in-person and virtual attendance with some of the participants being co-located, and others joining from remote locations with real-time streaming. This study sets out to explore the ways in which participants co-construct space across multiple sites by coordinating their presence and participation in hybrid daily Scrum meetings. We draw on multimodal conversation analysis to closely examine video recorded data from hybrid Scrum meetings of a software development team. Our analysis shows how participants orient to multiple spaces and their efforts in establishing and maintaining visibility and audibility. The findings have implications for an understanding of hybrid interactions in workplace meetings informing future designs of meetings and collaborative technologies for hybrid collaboration.
Introduction
Video mediated interaction has long been an integral part of everyday life and common to many workplaces for decades. Their use got steadily more widespread for distributed teams with an increase in awareness of corporate social responsibility (Arnfalk et al., 2016), environmental sustainability (Lindeblad et al., 2016), and the rise of anytime-, anywhere work culture (Perry et al., 2001). Yet, the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent restrictions on co-location upgraded the concept of interacting through video mediated technologies from a specialized format, mainly used for organizational and institutional activities, to an ordinary type of interaction and a ubiquitous event in everyday life (Due and Licoppe, 2021). Hybrid meetings are instances of video mediated interactions with co-located participants at one or more locations and/or one or more other participants joining from remote locations through real-time streaming. This setup exhibits spatial configurations between participants across remote sites. While co-located participants have direct and equal access to each other’s environment and productions (Kendon, 1990), remote participants underlie the technical limitations (Luff et al., 2003).
Video-mediated interactions rely heavily on audio-visual technologies designed to emulate co-located, face-to-face interaction (Mlynář et al., 2018). While these technologies enable participants to have synchronous communication with mutual access to image and sound, they do so through a narrow and unstable audio-visual channel that participants’ access to each other’s physical environment is very limited. Such setting ‘fractures the environments of action’ (Luff et al., 2003: 53) and creates interactional asymmetries (Heath and Luff, 1993). Accordingly, conversation analysis (CA) research on video mediated interaction recognizes this fragility of video mediated settings and the limitations of the audio-visual technologies especially when supporting organizational activities (Luff et al., 2016). Since participants do not share a co-present material space in video mediated presence, they are removed from interactional cues that communication and collaboration rely upon in co-located work environments (Hindmarsh et al., 1998). For example, with limited and asymmetric access to each other’s immediate environment, participants cannot monitor each other’s conduct (Balaman and Pakarek Doehler, 2022; Heath and Luff, 1993; Mlynář et al., 2018) which is a crucial resource for mutual intelligibility and coordination of collaborative wok (Heath and Luff, 2000).
Hybrid meetings cater to the characteristics of both co-located and video-mediated interaction. Similarly, they are constrained by the limitations of both in-person and remote attendance in meetings. The combined restrictions and affordances of both settings require further coordination to establish and maintain mutual understanding between co-located and remote participants. Although previous research explored the different ways in which people interact in and through video mediated environments (Heath and Luff, 1993; Luff et al., 2003) and documented participants’ orientations to the technology (Mondada, 2007), interactional resources when dealing with technological disruptions (Rintel, 2013), referential activities (Luff et al., 2016), and showing practices (Licoppe, 2017), how the spatial organization is made relevant in interaction in hybrid meetings with strict formats such as daily Scrum meetings remains to be explored.
Drawing on video recorded data collected from hybrid daily Scrum meetings, this study examines the hybrid ecology of the focal setting to explore the ways in which participants co-construct space by coordinating their presence and participation. The Scrum framework sets a specific procedure to follow for activities to be performed in meetings. In daily Scrum meetings, participants typically report on their progress one by one in a round-robin format (Stray et al., 2016). In the data, during their Scrum meetings some participants were co-located in a meeting room (i.e. the company office), while others joined from various remote locations by video stream. In this specific setting, participants in the company meeting room stand up and form a semi-circle facing a video meeting screen displaying remote participants and a shared project board. Using multimodal CA, we focus on the spatial configuration of the hybrid daily Scrum meetings and describe how participants orient to space and make the hybridness of the meeting relevant in their interactions. The findings present participants’ orientations in and toward the multiple spaces and their efforts in establishing and maintaining visibility and audibility through a shared screen with a wide-angle camera. In so doing, our analysis also shows how the participants to reflect the multi, trans-locational nature of the activity they are involved in.
Against this backdrop, this study aims to develop new insights into the systematic organization of interactions in hybrid settings. Our findings have implications for an understanding of what constitutes hybrid interaction in workplace meetings informing future designs of meetings especially regarding the configuration of the space and collaborative technologies for hybrid collaboration that fully recognizes the role of space. In subsequent sections, we first present how video mediated, and hybrid collaborations are described within multimodal conversation analytic research. Next, we describe our data and methods followed by the analysis of representative extracts from the dataset. Finally, we discuss the results and conclude the paper.
Review of literature
With the ongoing pandemic and subsequent restrictions on co-location, video mediated communication has become the predominant modus of interaction especially for workplace meetings. Video mediated environments are described as fractured ecologies by Luff et al. (2003). Such ecologies impose constraints on resources for participants’ mutual monitoring, which is essential for production, interpretation, and coordination of social actions (Heath and Luff, 2000). CA studies on video-mediated collaborations have provided important insights into the social organization of practical activities as they are accomplished in situ in interaction in video mediated settings (Arminen et al., 2016). These settings include but are not limited to medical encounters (Due and Lange, 2020), business meetings (Nielsen, 2019; Oittinen and Piirainen-Marsh, 2015), courtrooms (Licoppe, 2015; Licoppe and Dumoulin, 2007), and task-based learning environments (Balaman and Sert, 2017) . Further, comprehensive reviews of the CA literature on video mediated interaction have been undertaken by Arminen et al. (2016), Mlynář et al. (2018), and Due and Licoppe (2021).
Video-mediated interactions are conducted through video based synchronous communication technologies that besides advanced features facilitating interpersonal communication, frame typically portraits of ‘talking heads’ (Licoppe and Morel, 2012). These setups limit participants’ access to the physical domain and bodily conduct of co-participants (Hindmarsh et al., 1998) and are lacking in supporting work and organizational activities (Luff et al., 2016). These limitations emerge clearly in referential activities such as pointing (Luff et al., 2014), and showing objects (Licoppe, 2017). When interacting through video mediated systems, participants make the mediatedness of the setting relevant in their interaction by displaying orientations toward the mediation technology. A common case is the repair sequences when technical problems occur, and participants orient to fix them. For example, Rintel (2013) shows couples’ interactional work in their treatment of technical problems in video calls and find that the participants prioritize keeping their conversation going treating technological problems as non-repairables or making them part of their discussions. Licoppe (2017) documents how Skype is used to accomplish an everyday activity when family members and friends show objects to one another. Orientations to the technology and its shortcomings are more clearly marked in the opening phases of video mediated meetings with participants checking the technical setup and preparing the interactional floor before the main activity starts (Mondada, 2015; Oittinen and Piirainen-Marsh, 2015).
In video mediated interaction, since participants join the activity they are involved in from different locations, their actions are coordinated across multiple interactional spaces. As Heath and Luff, (2000) emphasize close physical arrangement and a shared view are critical to task coordination. In mediated ecologies, the fractured interactional spaces are bridged by narrow audio-visual channels. Being visible on the screen projects relevancy onto participants. Visuality and orientation toward the camera and microphone are treated as essential to communication in video mediated settings (Due and Licoppe, 2021; Relieu, 2007). Similarly, for objects to become visible, they need to be introduced into the video frame. For instance, Licoppe and Tuncer (2020) categorize ‘showing’ in video mediated communication as an ‘ostensive practice’ meaning: bringing something into the visual consideration of co-participants (Licoppe and Tuncer, 2019). In their study, participants bring previously not visible objects into view for recipients and make them visible so that they become relevant for talking about it.
Due to the multitude of remote sites and technical limitations in managing the continuity between them (i.e. camera angle, microphone sensitivity, internet bandwidth, spatial constraints), participants have to cope with starkly asymmetric perspectives in mediated meetings. This requires participants to repeatedly check and re-check respective positions in order to establish and maintain recipiency with co-participants and construct an interactional space (Mondada, 2009, 2013). To minimize this asymmetry, participants draw on available resources for example by using verification sequences (Mondada, 2007) and by adjusting material resources and their bodily orientations (Luff et al., 2016), in some cases, by manipulating objects for better visibility (Licoppe et al., 2017), and in other cases by adjusting the camera (Licoppe, 2014). The described characteristics of video mediated interaction apply to all video-mediated meetings, including hybrid meetings.
Hybrid meetings are audio and video-mediated multi-locational interactions. Doyle (2013 : 1) describes hybrid meeting as ‘a mixture of physical events with elements of a virtual event usually running simultaneously and with overlapping content and interactive elements’. Connecting co-located and remote participation frameworks through mediation technologies, hybrid meetings are common places in many industries, especially for workplaces relying upon distributed workforce. At the heart of hybrid meetings is video mediation systems, which besides featuring facilitating interpersonal communication between remote ends, poses limitations to varying degrees (Mlynář et al., 2018; Ruhleder and Jordan, 2001). In hybrid meetings, previously described asymmetry is aggravated by the mixture of both video-mediated and co-located interactional environments. Due to the socio-technical complexity of hybrid meeting settings, communicational troubles in distributed teams between participants in co-located and remote locations are common occurrences (Tutt et al., 2007). Co-located participants of distributed teams have additional locally shared interactional resources compared to remote ones; therefore, they tend to act as a sub-group and pay less attention to remote participants (Bos et al., 2006). Thus, the exclusion of remote participants is specific to hybrid meetings (Bos et al., 2004). Therefore, the inclusion of remote participants in hybrid meetings requires both social and technical considerations (Saatçi et al., 2020) by continuously managing the mutual visibility, for example, through visibility checks (Jakonen and Jauni, 2021). Relatedly, we deal with one such setting in which presence and participation are coordinated in an institutional setting, namely daily Scrum meetings.
Workplace meetings are institutionalized interactions reflecting the three basic characteristics of institutional talk with goal orientation, particular constraints on what participants will treat as allowable or not, and inferential frameworks and procedures (Drew and Heritage, 1992). As a workplace meeting format, Daily Scrum meetings are short (10–15 minutes) stand up meetings, commonly used by software development teams as part of their project management framework (Schwaber and Sutherland, 2012; Stray et al., 2016). The Scrum framework provides a clearly defined structure for the organization of daily Scrum meetings.
The physical arrangement of daily Scrum meetings typically includes participants forming a (semi)circle, attending the meeting while standing up, and reporting on their work progress one by one. This daily update allows the team to be synchronized and participants to be informed about each other’s development and maintains awareness within the team. When reporting progress participants are expected to refer to the task they have finished since the last meeting, the task they will be working on, and the problems they have met. Here, the turn taking organization is structured by the round-robin system which is used in multi-party interactions to organize turn-taking with each participant getting a turn at talk one after another in the chosen direction (Mortensen and Hazel, 2011; Stray et al., 2016). In such format the order of turns is commonly determined based on the physical proximity. This system reflecting Kendon’s F-formations (1976) allows participants to position themselves in relation to one another in order to monitor each other’s productions and ‘the spatial arrangements as well as maintain control over various body parts and make their movements sequentially relevant for the unfolding activity’. (Due, 2021: 257).
Overall, the limitations of video mediated presence form fragility (Fornel and Libbrecht, 1996) which becomes consequential for the accomplishment and progressivity of activities in professional settings and in workplace meetings (Büyükgüzel and Mitchell, In Press; Nielsen, 2019). Although workplace meetings, as pre-planned institutional events, are hindered by the ambiguity brought on by the socio-technical complexity of hybrid setups, in such settings, participants orient toward ensuring the progressivity in talk and the organizational activity (Büyükgüzel and Mitchell, In Press). In hybrid Scrum meetings, the hybrid setup that spans over several sites does not provide a continuous shared sequence of speakers preventing the ad hoc round robin style and making turn-taking difficult. Against this background, this paper focuses on how participants orient to space in interaction and coordinate their presence and interactional resources for both co-located and remote participation.
Methods
The video data for this study was recorded in 2018 at a Turkish software engineering and IT service providing company. The company’s workforce is organized in sprint teams implementing the Scrum method. One of the development teams from this company was recorded in five hybrid daily Scrum meetings in their company office. The team that we observed worked on developing a web application for a media company targeting multiple platforms (video text pages, smart TV, mobile devices, and computers).
The data consists of 63 minutes of video recordings from five daily Scrum meetings with durations between 11 and 15 minutes. Meetings were recorded in the company office by two tripod mounted video cameras capturing the whiteboard, and a total perspective of the office. In addition to these recordings, we also draw on the recordings of the shared screen taken directly from the video conferencing system. 1 The recorded meetings take place across multiple locations. Every day a varying number of participants join the meeting; with between 8 and 12 participants joining from the company office and between 8 and 10 from remote locations. Let us also note that we refer to the participants outside the company office (headquarters) as the remote participants to better describe their location at the time of the meeting. The data is transcribed following transcription conventions developed by Jefferson (2004) and Mondada (2018) and extended by the features offered by Talkbank project. 2
The meeting ecology of the team whose interactions have been recorded consists of an open office environment featuring a large screen with built in wide-angle camera and microphone, and individual workstations. Figure 1 displays the meeting ecology of the observed team’s hybrid Scrum meetings. However, the large screen almost always features the team’s digital Scrum board (Figure 2), while all participants’ feeds are listed as thumbnails at the bottom of the screen. The thumbnails are hardly visible to the participants in the company office, which requires additional measures to ensure visibility by dynamically configuring the meeting (see Extracts 1 and 2). The Scrum board is used to categorize and track work progress and tasks and is divided into four sections: to-do, in progress, testing, and done. The digital Scrum board represents time budgets and work package status and shows the result on a burndown chart, showing how much time the team has available to complete outstanding tasks. One of the participants updates the digital Scrum board during each meeting.
The company office setting and remote participants*.
The scrum board to track work progress.
Our analysis draws on Multimodal Conversation Analysis (Mondada, 2018; Sidnell and Stivers, 2012) for an in-depth examination of the activities performed in hybrid daily Scrum meetings. Multimodal CA has been used to document participants’ in situ accomplishments and their methodical ways to recognize and produce social actions (Heath and Luff, 2000). Such analysis focuses on interpretations and meaning generated by participants in interaction rather than researcher’s perspective, which aligns with our purposes in the present study – that is, to understand the participants’ ways of spatially configuring the hybrid Scrum meeting in situ.
Analysis
In this section, we present the analyses of four extracts that focus on how the physical positioning of the participants in the multiple spaces is interactionally consequential for the progressivity of the daily scrum meeting, thus demonstrating the spatial organization of the hybrid setting at hand. The extracts were selected (from a dataset of 61 minutes) to best represent the overall picture of the spatial organization as regards the hybridity of the setting based on the methods that reflect how the participants interactionally manage the inherent challenges in the daily Scrum meetings by carefully organizing the space and the multiple modes and locations on a moment-by-moment basis.
The first extract shows how the participants in the video-recorded meeting room use the physical space to become visible to the screen in a semi-circle format. The positioning of the participants in this room operates as the primary condition for participating to the hybrid meeting. That is to say, when the participants arrange their posture fully or partially oriented to the screen, it leads to the establishment of mutual orientation toward the meeting framework. We observe that showing this orientation at least once during the meeting is normative and the lack of such orientation is problematized. Extract 1 comes from the ninth minute into a meeting and a latecomer participant, Ugur (UGU), fails to achieve visibility in the semi-circle spatial organization, which is problematized by a remote co-participant. Before the beginning of the extract, despite being present in the company office for a while after his late attendance, UGU has not yet taken any turns in the conversation and not marked his new-coming status. UGU’s presence in the room is accessible to the co-participants in the company office but not to the remote participants.
In line 1, OSM, a remote participant, initiates a sequence to check the attendance of a colleague (
Overall, we have reached a number of conclusions related to the spatial organization of hybrid daily scrum meetings based on the close examination of the first extract: The semi-circle positioning of the participants by facing the screen is the primary condition for hybrid meetings and the meeting needs to be organized within the screen radius. This coverage determines the borderline between the hybrid interactional space and other subordinate, separate ecologies constituting the hybridity (e.g. physical meeting rooms and video-mediated interaction). Only when these ecologies are carefully organized by recognizing the spatial limits, the meeting becomes hybrid (see UGU’s physical entry in fig2 and fig3). The lack of participation (or absence from the meeting) needs to be accounted for. Accordingly, all participants need to become visible to the screen at least once especially if they arrive later than the beginning of the meeting. The breach of this norm is marked explicitly in interaction.
In the following extract, we see how such organization is reworked at different phases of the meeting and for diverse reasons. At the beginning of the same meeting as the first extract, a participant (MUS) takes the turn to deliver his report, yet we see that his position in the co-present material space does not align with the normative spatial organization of the hybrid daily scrum meetings and it is problematized by a remote participant:
The second extract starts with MUS’s reporting of the previous day’s tasks and the relevant planned work for the day of the meeting (
Following the resolution of the trouble in hearing, MUS delivers another extended reporting turn from line 13 to 24. Toward the end of his telling, in line 21 MUS deploys an indexical marker and points to the screen. His pointing gesture is oriented to the burndown chart on the screen as it is almost always featured on top of the screen. This is also interesting in that it shows that YAS, the remote participant who previously initiated repair to resolve the trouble in hearing, is only visible as a thumbnail on the screen. Therefore, the normativity of visibility in the company office does not work the same in video-mediated layer of the hybrid meeting. Instead, the technical affordances of the screen are used at full capacity, and the screen bridges the multiple participation frameworks with the technical tools required for the daily scrum meeting. After YAS’s confirmation (
All in all, as for the spatial organization of the hybrid daily scrum meetings, we further observe that participants’ visibility on screen is also consequential for audibility, thus being essential for mutual understanding, therefore visibility would better not be blocked. The current speaker from the company office is positioned closely to the screen to increase visibility and audibility by fully exploiting the affordances of the built-in microphone and the wide angled camera. Finally, the remote participants’ full-screen visibility to the co-participants is a lower priority than the other way around.
In the third extract of the study, we present an extended scrum meeting episode that includes the participants’ efforts for dealing with technical troubles related to audibility while reporting work-progress and show how the participants orient to multiple interactional spaces in so doing. Unlike the first two extracts, here we see that the visibility and audibility problem does not necessarily only apply for the participants based in the company office but also the remote participants’ audibility is also accountable for the social coordination, thus playing a central role in the spatial organization of the hybrid meeting.
The extract starts with ISM’s turn allocation with an address term in line 1. ISM participates from the company office while the nominated participant is connecting through Google Hangouts. After 5 seconds of silence in line 2, YAS, another distant participant, repeats the nomination. In line 4, UGU initiates repair by pointing to a technical trouble in MEH’s audio verbally and bodily (see fig1). In overlap with the final part of UGU’s turn, MEH resolves the technical trouble and starts delivering his report. In these first five lines of the extract, we observe that a technical trouble on a remote participant’s device has been resolved with the collaborative efforts of all participants. Moreover, what is initiated as translocated interaction (ISM to MEH) is first problematized by remote participants (YAS to MEH) and bodily marked and resolved through the translocated interaction (UGU to MEH). We argue that the transition between the physical spaces is extremely swift as it is treated as a natural action in the hybrid setting.
From line 5 on, MEH delivers an extended reporting turn; however, his turn delivery is disrupted multiple times due to the distorted audio transmission (lines 8 and 15) and lapses in the connection (line 15 and 19). YAS requests clarification in line 20 possibly due to the disrupted delivery (
In line 45, NEC explicitly claims non-understanding (
In sum, the third extract has indicated that the spatial organization of the meeting also entails quick transitions between the multiple locations that are socially coordinated throughout. In the company office, we also observe parallel activities that are both on-task and off-task. Let us also revisit the final moments of Extract 2 here: A reporting participant turned slightly toward a co-participant in the same physical space, that is, the company office, after being recruited with a clarification question which was sequentially relevant in the meeting and recognizably moving the reporting forward. However, the whole-group claim of non-understanding and accompanying mocking in Extract 3 did not make any meeting-relevant action relevant next, but solely functioned as an interim episode remaining in the company office. The fact that the target of the episode is meeting-relevant leads us to label it as on-task unlike the phone browsing individually that is not meeting-relevant in any way we could observe. We will come back to the quick transition between multiple locations that define the spatial organization of the hybrid meeting in the analysis of the next extract. Before doing so, let us note that our final observation related to the spatial organization of the hybrid meeting is oriented to the membership categorization occurring during the on-task parallel activity. We conclude that the invoked identities add to our analysis of the parallelness of the activity. To put it more clearly, by deploying diverging membership categories the participants in the company office achieve a temporary suspension from the meeting, which becomes recognizable to the participants (and to the researchers) as a parallel activity that is also observable in the call for continuation to close the episode.
What follows is the last extract of this study and it clearly shows how hybrid interaction is distinctively established in and through the spatial organization across multiple physical locations. The extract comes from the same meeting as the previous extract and marks the closing of the entire daily scrum meeting.
The extract starts with HAL’s reporting turn from line 1 to 7 that consists of multiple work-progress related references (
After turning head to OSM, in line 11 YAS asks a question to OSM. This question marks the beginning of an episode in their physically co-located space in a sequentially relevant position as the earlier reporting was closed and acknowledged, and the transition into another episode was bodily signaled. It clarifies the distinction between parallel activities and main activities despite both being meeting-relevant. On an additional note, at this point, OSM engages in a parallel off-task activity, that is, gazing at his phone before being allocated the turn. In line 12, he responds to YAS’s inquiry without withdrawing his gaze from the phone, thus both maintaining the parallel off-task activity and temporarily attending to the on-task activity. This question-answer sequence is closing implicative, and YAS opens up the closing right after by turning her head back to the screen and initiating the terminal sequence that is accompanied with the hand waving (see fig2 and 3). We should note that all participants except UGU and BIL minutely coordinate the embodied closing by initiating the same bodily action simultaneously.
Overall, the last extract of the study has confirmed the findings in the earlier extracts. Regarding the spatial organization, we have presented that the remote co-participants sharing the same room are also positioned within the camera coverage. Therefore, their actions are treated meeting-relevant and made accessible to all co-participants in the meeting.
Discussion and conclusion
Previous research recognized the fragility and the challenge of coordinating interaction in mediated settings and ascribed the complexity to the limitations of video mediated setups (Licoppe and Due, 2021; Luff et al. 2014; Luff et al., 2016; Rintel, 2013). Although these studies extensively explored how participants interact in and through video mediation, the spatial organization of talk and interaction in hybrid workplace setups with one (or more) crowded physical location (i.e. the company office) and the multiple individual and small-group participants remained unexplored. Addressing this gap, this study examined hybrid Scrum meetings in order to understand how space is co-constructed in them. Drawing on the video recorded data from a software development team’s daily Scrum meetings, our multimodal CA analysis focused on the spatial configuration of these meetings and described how participants coordinate their presence and participation and how they make the space relevant in interaction. The analysis has shown how social interaction in this specific setting is organized with participants’ using available interactional resources and their in situ accomplishments.
Our findings align with the studies confirming the potential fragility of video-mediated collaborations (Licoppe and Due, 2021; Luff et al., 2003; Mlynář et al., 2018) and participants’ orientations to the resulting socio-technical troubles (Licoppe, 2017; Mondada, 2007; Rintel, 2013). As a form of video mediated interaction, examined hybrid meetings featured a fractured ecology, in which participants had to cope with starkly asymmetric perspectives; with remote participants limited to constraints and affordances of the audio-visual connection, while co-located participants having locally shared interactional resources. In this setup, connecting multiple remote sites hindered the production and maintenance of mutual understanding leading participants to constantly configure the interactional space using verbal and embodied resources (Mondada, 2009, 2013) to keep the meeting and the activity going.
Our findings suggest that the spatial organization illustrates participants’ orientations in and toward the multiple spaces and their efforts in establishing and maintaining visibility and audibility through a shared screen with a wide-angle camera. In his seminal study on F-formation Kendon (1990) describes the ways in which people coordinate their bodily positions and their presence in order to have a direct, easy, and equal access to each other’s environment. In observed meetings, the participant in the company office meeting room attended the meeting while standing up and formed a semi-circle facing a video meeting screen displaying the remote participants. In hybrid settings, since the interactional space is dispersed, participants have to manage the continuity between arrangements and alignments of their bodily positions and presence for achieving both remote and co-located participation. This requires co-located participants to take into account remote participants’ vision of the local environment and take measures to equalize all participants’ visibility. Participation frameworks and membership categories employed by participants reflect this multi-locational nature of the activity they are involved in hybrid meetings.
The inherent complexity of hybrid settings requires participants to repeatedly check respective spatial positions in order to establish and maintain recipiency with co-participants. To ensure the reciprocity of perspectives (Schutz, 1970) it is important that participants have visual access to each other’s domain and conduct in it. The fixed frame of typical video streaming setups severely limits the visibility producing interactional asymmetries between remote locations. Additionally, the absence of one shared physical space in hybrid meetings hinders producing and maintaining a shared focus of attention. This overhead multiplies with each connected environment. Participants in hybrid meetings have considerable number of impediments against establishing and maintaining recipiency. In this fragile interactional space, establishing and maintaining intersubjectivity requires participants’ constant interactional effort and work. Participants orient to these asymmetries in an effort to become more visible and audible when relevant. Our analysis shows how participants take into account the fragility of interactional space and they modulate their productions in order to secure recipiency for example, by talking louder, slower, stepping into the camera, using clearly understandable words. This is not limited to technologically mediated communication; it is inherent to recipient design. In loud environments such as in traffic, in production flows, sports events, people modulate their productions in order to overcome the constraints of the environment and to secure recipiency.
Mediation systems used in hybrid meetings do not only connect spaces that are remote from each other, but also enables the emergence of diverse membership categories. Typically, the feeds from the different spaces are displayed on a shared screen. The gallery of talking heads on the shared screen shows individual remote participants alongside frames displaying groups of people in meeting rooms. In hybrid settings, participants have to take into account each of the co-located and remote participants’ access to what is shared on the screen. Compared to complete video mediated meetings, where all participants are remote to each other and each underlie the similar participation limitations, merging remote and local participations creates additional overhead in the meeting ecology. In this setting, participants’ transition between profoundly different and multiple locations constraints on audibility and visibility requiring additional coordination (Jakonen and Jauni, 2021).
All in all, this study by providing an in-depth analysis of how hybrid daily Scrum meetings are spatially organized contributes to understanding of interactions in hybrid settings. Our findings have implications for an understanding of hybrid interactions in workplace meetings informing future designs of meetings and collaborative technologies for hybrid collaboration, which calls for future research on the topic.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.