Virtual Meeting Rescues Workplaces

 How to make employees, customers and investors live together harmoniously in the meeting.

The lobby can shape people's first impression of a company. When visiting the New York headquarters of investment bank Jefferies, the first thing guests saw was a section of the Berlin Wall purchased by the company from the East German government. In the London office of Slaughter and May law firm, water drips slowly from the curtain wall of the atrium into a shallow pool made of natural stone. At the San Francisco office of the software giant Salesforce, visitors are greeted by a 32-meter video wall with pictures such as the magnificent waterfall or the Pac-Man game.

As the COVID pandemic has forced many offices around the world to close, these key first impressions have been replaced by video conferencing. As employees are trapped at home, meetings with subordinates, colleagues, customers, and investors in the company have almost all turned online. Almost all the once crowded activities, from performance reviews to shareholder meetings, road shows and IPOs, have almost all moved to the Internet.

Virtual meeting rescues the workplace

Since March 2020, the NASDAQ exchange in New York has held more than 150 online listing bell ceremonies. There are also at least 140 games held by the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The total time people spend on Microsoft's Teams video conferencing platform has reached 45 million hours a day, three times the amount before. Zoom has also become a verb from a fairly successful startup (although it is still the four letters Z-O-O-M for some people who can't pronounce it).

Now, as many companies begin to reopen their offices and reset mixed work arrangements, they are also rethinking the way they meet. Whether you like it or not (more likely to hate it), meetings are an important part of modern business. Therefore, managers must decide whether to retain and which remote experiences to retain. Zoom's survey of more than 7,000 people in 10 countries shows that two-thirds of people hope to meet in a mixed virtual and face-to-face manner in the future. In other words, just as all work is divided into remote and on-site, the future model of conferences cannot be one-size-fits-all.

All online meetings will continue to exist. Zoom’s stock price plummeted on August 30, but this was only due to its announcement of a slowdown in growth in the latest quarter. Lumi, a service provider that helps organize shareholder meetings, claims that 90% of meetings this year will be fully remote, compared with 11% in 2019. OpenExchange expects to organize 200,000 online or mixed events for companies and investors in 2021, compared to only 4,000 in 2019.

The raging Delta strain is one of the reasons that forced companies to postpone its plan to fully return to the conference room, but it is not the only reason. Virtual meetings allow more people to participate without having to travel remotely. In addition, online meetings are more flexible. According to Doodle's research, which provides event scheduling services, during the epidemic, British workers arranged meetings at times when they were still commuting to and from get off work.

Video conferencing works well in many ways. Consulting agency Deloitte surveyed 1,000 senior executives engaged in private equity transactions and mergers and acquisitions in the United States, and found that 87% of the respondents claimed to be able to conclude transactions in a purely virtual environment, and more than half were willing to continue using this approach after the epidemic.

Challenges of virtual meeting

But virtual meetings also have disadvantages. More meetings can be arranged intensively in a day, causing Zoom fatigue (this word has also become a daily phrase). Such meetings are also less likely to end on time. Microsoft's research shows that the average meeting time on Microsoft Teams has increased from 35 minutes to 45 minutes compared to a year ago (probably because of the lack of physical prompts such as people getting up and leaving or the next group of people rushing in to grab the venue).

The hybrid conference mode where some people are on-site and others are remotely accessing them creates special challenges. Most organizations have insufficient investment in audio-visual technology, and it is difficult to ensure that people who remotely access the conference can be seen and heard without feeling like a second-class citizen. In most conference rooms set up before the epidemic, this aspect was not considered properly. Poor lighting and incorrect microphone positions are common.

This kind of technical troubles can be solved through technical upgrades and reasonable design of office space. Companies are experimenting with larger, higher-quality screens, cameras that can follow the speaker's voice, voice tracking cameras, and tools to eliminate background noise. Software that can record meetings or transcribe text is becoming an industry standard, reducing the pressure on employees to participate in all links. Silicon Valley giants such as Microsoft and Facebook have gone a step further and are developing a "metaverse" of augmented reality, where users can interact with others in real time.

Some companies not so welcome virtual meeting 

But not everyone is so determined. Some companies are resisting virtual culture. Many Wall Street bosses are firmly opposed to remote work, including remote meetings. JPMorgan Chase Bank recalled its employees to the office earlier than other institutions, and now has asked its bankers to board the plane to meet with customers in person. Jamie Dimon, the boss of JPMorgan Chase Bank, provided the company's private jets to the managing directors. This summer, the bank launched an informal contest where employees who had face-to-face meetings with customers were able to earn points. It is said that the prize was a meal with a senior official of JPMorgan Chase. Dimon may still have some truth: In Zoom's research, seven out of ten respondents believe that meeting customers in person is important.

In order to prevent the sparks of thought that appeared in impromptu meetings, many companies are changing their office layouts, hoping to facilitate such opportunities when employees work in person. A survey of 400 international companies by the real estate consulting firm Knight Frank shows that in the next three years, more than half of the companies are expected to increase the proportion of collaboration areas in their offices. Finnish telecommunications equipment manufacturer Nokia announced that starting next year, 70% of the company's office space will be dedicated to collaboration and teamwork. Cloud storage company Dropbox has sold its headquarters in San Francisco, and the company's new office space (internally called a studio) will have larger meeting rooms with flexible layouts.

The trend

Although the vast majority of people in the survey claimed to prefer mixed work, they have different understandings of what this means for meetings. For large gatherings, 61% of the respondents to the Zoom questionnaire are clearly inclined to the virtual environment, and only 39% chose the physical venue. However, different genders have different tendencies. 44% of men tend to attend large conferences in person, while the proportion of women is only 33% (research shows that women generally speak less at conferences and are easily interrupted by men). For small team meetings, half of the people tend to adopt online and offline methods. The work culture in some countries is particularly against virtualization: 41% of French workers insist that they only want to meet face-to-face.

Some decisions will be simple. Almost all meetings where critical decisions need to be made, or meetings to introduce new clients, are conducted in person. For less critical but somewhat important talks, it is more complicated to consider. One thing is certain. Many meetings will still maintain a headache for managers and subordinates to attend.