Virtual Meetings - the stats
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Seattle startup Read just released its first study after measuring more than 3 million virtual meeting minutes since launching in September, when it announced its $10 million seed round. The company’s software measures engagement and sentiment of participants on video meetings.
For meetings with seven or more people, some of the findings include:
- 50% of participants arrive late
- 40% have below average or poor engagement
- 22% of participants don’t say a single word
- 11% don’t have video or audio on
Overall, one in five video conference calls had a below average meeting score, and 31% of meetings start late.
“The scale and impact of bad meetings is a massive drain on resources and morale,” said David Shim, CEO of Read.
Shim said with workers going remote amid the pandemic, people erred on the side of inviting more participants, and the default response of those invited was to accept. This is what introduced “Zoom Fatigue,” he said.
Insert Jeffrey Toobin joke wherever appropriate.
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Do any of you techies remember Cabletron? They started way back when, cabling office buildings but then started building network hubs, forming an early duopoly with Bay Networks (back when Cisco and Wellfleet had the duopoly on routers).
When they were a small firm run by the two founders I had some interactions with them. One of the founders told me they had no chairs in meeting rooms to encourage shorter meetings. He said that he had been at a large company early in his career which was full of VPs that just sat in meetings all day, and didn't want to replicate that at his firm.
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@jon-nyc said in Virtual Meetings - the stats:
I'd say it's closer to 62.4%
Also what's with them always lasting an hour? That's obviously a cultural artifact. Not some universal constant of group decision making.
Yes to both. It would be a lot better if two things happened:
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No meeting invitation can be sent out without a strict agenda that is adhered to.
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Training was developed so one would know who HAD to be at the meeting and who could simply receive the minutes afterward.
Voila! 25% increased productivity for two simple steps.
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Worked for a hospital administrator years ago, that was great at meetings. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am...Anything he chaired did not exceed thirty minutes.
Chit-chatters and rabbit chasers would gently be steered back to topic on the first transgression. The second time elicited the stare of the Basilisk and usually some idiotic report that had to be on his desk by noon Friday. As time passed and people were schooled, very few useless reports were assigned.
It's amazing how fast and productive a meeting can be, when everyone is focused and confined to the agenda.
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I have... 16 meetings this week, which is about average. Half of them are with a particular department that always schedules them for 30 or 60 minutes. Half the time, they end much sooner than that and everyone logs off. With another department, 15-minute and 20-minute meetings are the norm.
All participants end up saying something, because no one’s on the call that shouldn’t be.
In 2020, they had a study done on productivity regarding having audio or video on, and what they found was that extroverted employees will usually volunteer to have their video and audio on, and this doesn’t negatively impact their participation in the meetings. But with introverts, due to the volume of meetings everyone has throughout the week, when audio and video is mandatory, they become far less engaged, not more, and the likelihood of them reporting to feel burned out was above 70%. So the official company policy is that you can do whatever the hell you want with respect to audio and video, and any mandate to use audio or video should be reported.
The structure’s kinda cool, too. There are no “managers” in a typical sense. There are peers who do managerial and project management tasks, but they don’t hold sway over folks like me; they have no more agency than I do. There are other people for that, but they’re not the ones who set up the meetings. In other words, managers can’t hold underlings hostage because they want to hear themselves speak.
The amount of meetings is still kinda bullshit at times, but I’m amazed how little I care how many I have throughout the week. The system is bureaucratic as all hell but there are places where it does work.
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I actually think a little bit of socializing at the beginning is healthy in the virtual environment, since the coffee room encounters don’t happen. But after that first couple minutes, I want efficiency.
I have three standing foundation meetings most weeks. One is very tightly run and ends at or near the 30m mark. Another is variable based on agenda but it has senior MD/PhDs from 10 different institutions who all have busy schedules so it ends when it needs to. The third is a bit sloppier. It is oddly scheduled from 10:15-10:45 and often runs to the top of the hour for relatively frivolous reasons.
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Do the stats measure parallel productivity?
Let’s say a well-meaning participant gets invited to a meeting but his active participation is needed for only 5 minutes out of the 45 scheduled for the meeting, so for the other 40 minutes he either “arrived late” or “left early” or “be on mute with video off” and still remain productive working on other things.
I’d be very surprised if a company doing its measurements based only on what’s recorded in virtual meetings can get to these things that are not recorded by virtual meeting tools. This well-meaning participant would just contribute to the “arrive late” or “leave early” or “mute/video off” statistics.
Before you ask “why invite someone to a 45 minute meeting when he’s only needed for 5”, the practical answer is there are many things for which a 5-minute real-time interactive Q&A can resolve a lot more than back-and-forth group emails that take over 50 minutes to compose.
