Advice from thousands of hybrid meetings

Hi Everyone,

Read.ai looked at thousands of hybrid meetings and found that people physically in the room asked nearly twice as many questions as remote colleagues. If you run a hybrid team, you've probably seen it happen.

The same three or four people end up doing most of the talking, and remote colleagues go quiet.

A simple format change can change this for the better.

Why do the same four people always talk

Research on group decision-making points to a problem called shared-information bias. Groups spend most of their time on what everyone is comfortable with and skip the one or two pieces of new information that matter most. In hidden-profile experiments, this usually leads to worse decisions, because the group never gets to the information that would change the answer.

If your team is hybrid, it gets worse. Remote colleagues lose their chance to jump in while people in the room talk over one another. Telling people to unmute or doing a round-robin doesn't fix that.

The result is usually a meeting run by a handful of voices. And those aren't always the people closest to the problem.

The 'written decision memo' fix

Basecamp handles most internal discussions in written posts and comments over one to three days, and keeps live meetings to two or three people only when they really need one. Jason Fried says it gives people, no matter their time zone or comfort level, a chance to think before they respond instead of rewarding whoever reacts fastest.

Amazon does something similar, just in a different way. At the start of every meeting, everyone reads a memo in silence for 15 to 30 minutes. Nobody gives a presentation, and the discussion starts only after everyone has the same background context. This way, the meeting isn't overly influenced by whatever the first person says.

Atlassian advises sending the agenda and pre-read at least 24 hours in advance. That gives introverts time to think, and remote people time to catch up, without the hallway chatter everyone else gets.

All three approaches do the same thing. They separate thinking from talking, so everyone can use the best information to arrive at the best decisions.

"Just write more" creates its own problems

Stripe relies on narrative docs and long emails instead of slide decks. But they found that employees who speak English as a second language felt put off by the pressure of high-stakes writing. So they added onboarding support, mentoring, and office hours just for writing. Writing-first only works as an inclusion fix if you help the people who aren't comfortable writing yet.

There's a second problem. Josh Bernoff says memo culture falls apart if nobody actually reads the memo. People write docs that colleagues skim or ignore, and the meeting slides right back into slide walkthroughs. Amazon's silent-reading step fixes that by using meeting time to read together, so nobody can fake their way through.

If you try this, pair the docs with a simple template, build reading time into the meeting itself, and give less confident writers some support.

Try this today

Before your next meeting involving an important decision, download the decision template and spend a few minutes filling it in. Send it to the group 24 hours in advance. When the meeting starts, give everyone 10 minutes to read it in silence before you open the floor.

You might notice the discussion is shorter, and the quieter people in the room actually weigh in.

Download your free template here

Go deeper

👉 Read.ai: Power Dynamics in Meetings Report 2026 – Quantifies how in-room participants dominate hybrid meetings across speaking time, questions, and pace.

👉 Atlassian: How to Run Inclusive Meetings – Practical guide on pre-reads, agendas, and post-meeting notes for introverts and remote colleagues.

👉 Slab: How Stripe Built a Writing Culture – Inside Stripe's narrative-first approach, including how they support ESL employees.

👉 Josh Bernoff: Write More, Meet Less – Honest take on why memo cultures fail without enforced reading norms.

Coming up tomorrow

Tomorrow we'll share a quick test to figure out whether your business is ready to expand into new markets or should go deeper with current customers first.

Thanks for reading, and have a great week.

P.S. If you try the template this week, reply and tell us how the discussion changed.