People are going online – how virtual meetings are changing business and personal communication check here

People are going online – how virtual meetings are changing business and personal communication check here

Over the past two years, demand for virtual meetings has grown by hundreds of percent worldwide. And contrary to fears, businesses have only benefited from it, as evidenced by many studies.

Some 65 percent of companies in the U.K. reported an increase in employee productivity working fully or partially remotely

70% of companies in developed countries have long-term plans to implement and develop the concept of remote working

Group meetings are most likely to last about 60 minutes, personal meetings are two to four times shorter.

65% of companies from different countries and industries reported that they did not lose a single client when they switched to the online format of work

Only 32% of companies believe face-to-face meetings are more important than communicating online

People love to meet. Communication and social interaction – one of the fundamental factors in human development, not to mention the fact that effective communication, both within the team and with external partners, and is the most important factor in the development of any business. Year by year there is more and more communication. As for the business of online dating, where the number of users of sites and applications has increased greatly. One of these examples eden dating app for Christians.

In turn, office work, by definition, involves a large number of business meetings and all kinds of meetings. But whatever the reasons, the result is clear – the volume of communication is growing. The COVID-19 pandemic has not had much impact on this global process, but it has led to a change in the approach to communication – personal, physical meetings in many cases moved to an online format and this situation seems to take hold for a long time. In any case, a number of studies suggest that remote work, with modern IT tools, in general, suits everyone – both employers and employees.

These are general trends, but what are the details? How has the approach to online communications changed because of the pandemic? And what will be the long-term implications of current processes? The answers to these questions were provided in particular by Doodle, which conducted an extensive study on this topic, resulting in the State of Meetings 2021 thematic report. The analysis is based on more than 30 million meetings held around the world between January 1 and December 31, 2020. The full version of the document is available on the company’s website, and here we will look at the most interesting points of the study. Note that the report is based on data from the U.S., the U.K., Germany and other economically developed countries. But given that they are setting global technology and market trends, the data will be quite relevant to almost all regions, at least in the Western Hemisphere.

Demand for virtual meetings is growing

One important consequence of the growth in demand for remote communications has been that most companies have significantly stepped up their efforts to modernize digital infrastructures at all levels and, accordingly, have stepped up their investments in IT. So, indirectly, the pandemic has pushed organizations around the world to innovate en masse. Even though the coronavirus pandemic has put many companies in a tough spot, most of them still believe it’s worth increasing, not decreasing, technology spending in the current environment.

Organizations have mostly rebuilt their IT infrastructures, but now they need to maintain, develop, ensure cybersecurity, and so on. In addition, for many companies, the downturn in 2020 has been replaced by business growth in 2021. As a result, there has been an acute shortage of qualified personnel. According to the IDG Research Report, in this situation, up to 75% of organizations have turned to internal reserves and planned to improve the efficiency of existing employees. The method here is to automate various business processes, including sales, customer interaction, etc. Through the use of modern online tools, an employee of the sales department, for example, can reach a much larger layer of potential and existing customers without losing efficiency, as well as much faster learn new products.

At the same time, fears that the remote format of work will reduce the productivity of employees are obviously unfounded. Thus, according to the UK Office of National Statistics, due to quarantine restrictions, at some point in 2020, only 37% of people in the country traveled to work. However, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), about 65% of companies reported an increase in productivity of employees working fully or partially remotely. This situation encourages employers to develop and maintain such a format, which will lead to a further increase in the number of virtual meetings. Even more revealing situation was observed in Germany, where, according to Deloitte report, 70% of companies already have long-term plans to implement and develop the concept of remote working. Similar trends have been observed in other developed European countries.

Anatomy of virtual meetings

According to Doodle research, the most popular group meeting format involved an average of five participants (in Western Europe, meetings were more numerous – 8-10 people). At the same time, the majority of group meetings lasted about an hour.

As for one-on-one virtual communication, the number of such meetings during the pandemic grew significantly faster than the number of group meetings. This is quite obvious, considering that, in most cases, face-to-face meetings were spontaneous. While it used to be possible to approach a colleague in the office to discuss current issues, now, often, the only way to communicate is to call him or her at Zoom, Teams, Cisco Meetings, etc.   

More often than not, 1:1 meetings last anywhere from 15-30 minutes. Actually, this trend has a very scientific basis – according to various studies, on average, a person can handle no more than 10-18 minutes of concentration, after which the decline of perception and every minute of communication becomes less effective. The critical limit is half an hour. After that, the vast majority of people just pretend to participate in the conversation. In a group meeting, concentration is maintained longer because attention tends to shift between meeting participants.

It is also noted that half, of all remote meetings take place between employees within a company, which speaks to the powerful role of virtual communication tools in internal business processes.

Also an interesting, though obvious, trend was the sharp increase (by 78%) in the number of huge online meetings, with the number of participants up to a thousand people or more. In most cases, these are protocol meetings and meetings, the frequency of which is regulated at the level of laws. In most countries, large companies are required to hold shareholder meetings at least once a year. The use of cloud-based platforms for remote communication has generally solved this problem.

Sales are going online

For years, there was a widespread belief that not being able to reach customers in person was a sure path to falling sales. Confidence in this was so high that few dared to seriously try this approach. But, the pandemic presented companies with a stark choice: go online as much as possible or withdraw from the market altogether. Most chose the first option, and it turned out that many of the earlier fears were in vain. A Doodle survey showed that 65% of respondents from different countries and industries said they had not lost a single customer, and 30% of respondents said that customers were less likely to cancel virtual meetings compared to face-to-face ones.

Perception issues

It may seem that the widespread use of remote communication solutions and the move to telecommuting brings only benefits, but unfortunately this is not entirely true. There are individual disadvantages as well. One major problem is that not all employees, especially those over the age of 50, can quickly master all the necessary tools and skills of digital communication. This, in turn, somewhat reduces the overall productivity of the company. Though, of course, adaptation is a matter of time.

More serious is another problem, which has even been given an original name – Zoom Fatigue – caused by the fact that online communication, even with high-quality video, is not the full equivalent of face-to-face meetings. In real life, the human brain receives much of the information about the interlocutor on the basis of non-verbal signals, while when the communication takes place on a platform like Zoom or MS Meetings, the number of such signals is dramatically limited.

According to Harvard Business, remote employees who live alone increasingly feel alienated from the rest of their colleagues.

What to do about all these potential problems is not yet fully clear, but it is necessary, because it is not far from professional burnout on a global scale. At the moment, the optimal approach is to implement a hybrid approach to work organization in organizations that combines remote and office modes.

It is also worth noting that virtual (especially group) meetings require a more careful approach to planning, since employees of the same company may work in several time zones, for example.

The future of mobility

When it comes to long-term predictions, it’s clear that the further ahead, the more meetings will take place online. This applies not only to business meetings within the company, but also to work with clients and recruitment interviews. At the same time, the meetings themselves tend to be shorter. There is a growing body of evidence that shorter meetings are more productive, and at the same time help reduce the likelihood of employee emotional burnout.

While most people still work from a desktop computer or laptop, there is a gradual increase in the number of tasks performed using mobile devices.

Overall, however, it’s clear that after the initial shock of having to transition quickly to a new work format, most organizations have already adapted to the dramatically changed environment and are now looking for the best formats and ways to address potential and actual challenges, both technological and organizational. So there is still a lot of work to be done here, although a fundamental change in current trends is not foreseen.