Business meetings in a post-pandemic world: When and how to meet virtually?

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic that erupted in 2020 forced businesses across the world to adopt virtual meetings. With many people working from home, software platforms like Zoom and Teams became ubiquitous. However, their widespread use also revealed many weaknesses and limitations. While technologies for virtual meetings have existed for decades, these technologies have advanced significantly in recent years, and today range from audio-conference facilities to telepresence rooms with high-resolution video and sophisticated virtual presence features. The available alternatives differ significantly in costs, complexity and capabilities, and choosing the most effective technology for each meeting setting is not always easy. This is important, since after the pandemic, virtual meetings will move from being a necessity to being a widely accepted alternative to traditional face-to-face meetings. Consequently, the questions of when and how to meet virtually will become even more significant. In this paper, we describe a decision-making framework for choosing when and how to meet virtually, based on the importance of communication capabilities for categories of meeting objectives and taking into account meeting size and duration. The framework is based on extensive empirical research conducted in partnership with a number of major US and European companies.