Study Reveals The State Of The Formal Meeting

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

New web conferencing tools could help start meetings on time and deliver more value.

It is not a shock that the sheer volume of meetings is on the rise for today’s average employee, or that the vast majority of today’s employees report they get little or no value out of most of the meetings they attend. Yet, surprisingly, few workers would argue that communication and collaboration are critical to achieving their goals.

This disconnect is a reflection of the proliferation in the types and locations of the modern meeting, the rise of today’s highly mobile, consumerized workplace, and the tools most companies employ to facilitate such collaboration.

A new study from Ovum and join.me by LogMeIn, examines collaboration and meeting-related behaviors and activities of over 3,900 full-time professionals worldwide. Report findings include the following:

• 91 percent of employees are spending more time in meetings than ever before.
• Ad hoc and virtual meetings are on the rise, fueled by an increasingly collaborative and connected workforce, yet they are not sufficiently supported by traditional web conferencing tools and solutions.
• Late start times, a key reason meetings fail to deliver value, are costing executives 5 days and 19 hours per year in lost time and productivity.
• Frustration with traditional web conferencing tools has led 66 percent of corporate buyers to look for new collaboration solutions to accommodate modern workforce behavior.
• 32 percent of all meetings are virtual, a trend that skews higher for younger workers (age 26 to 35) who report that 38 percent of all of their meetings are held virtually.
• Meanwhile, 67 percent of employees report that more than half of the meetings they attend are not of value.
• Traditional web conferencing tools are viewed to be a poor fit for ad hoc meetings and one-on-one meetings, often being cited as a key a reason for meeting delays and inefficiency.
• The era of the dominance of the PC and projector in the meeting room is coming to an end with employees increasingly taking devices such as tablets and laptops into the meeting room, blurring the lines between physical and virtual meetings.

While there are many studies on enterprise mobility and the impact of IT consumerization, this is the largest study of this kind undertaken on the specific topic of changing physical and virtual meeting behaviors and the evolving requirements of the collaborative workforce for virtual collaboration and web conferencing.

An infographic, representing the data may be found here.

The full report may be downloaded here.