In an era of global teams and remote workers, the loss of in-person communication may take a toll on collaboration and connectivity. Blue Jeans Network (bluejeans.com), a cloud-based video collaboration service headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., released research on “the state of the modern meeting,” that benchmarks trends in collaboration and demonstrates how technology is reshaping meetings.
The report reveals that people are joining meetings from anywhere and everywhere and that women are leading the charge. The Blue Jeans data reveals key trends in modern meetings:
• An average business meeting lasts 45 minutes and has 4.3 participants.
• Women are “leaning in” to meetings, attending 11 percent more meetings than men.
• Running a company can mean running late as CEOs, CTOs and founders are most often late to meetings.
• Early morning meetings and 9-to-5 days are no longer the norm, with 49 percent of meetings taking place between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. and most workdays concluding by 10 p.m.
Manic Mondays can’t blame meetings
Traditional Monday morning meetings have given way to meetings any time or day of the week, but punctuality is regional.
• One in 10 meetings are held on weekends; Wednesdays and Thursdays are the most popular meeting days.
• People still take time for lunch, with a 20 percent decline in meetings from noon to 1 p.m.
• Less than half (49 percent) of meetings start on time, with meetings in the Midwest more likely to start on time than meetings on the East or West coasts
Collaboration is king
With teams scattered across the country and around the world, people join meetings from a multitude of locations and devices including laptops or desktops (77 percent of the time), conference rooms (56 percent of the time), telephones (30 percent of the time) and video-enabled mobile devices (30 percent of the time).
Miles don’t matter
Miles are no match for modern meetings as people collaborate across the globe. Singapore, San Francisco, Prague, Dubai and New York are some of the cities from which people most frequently collaborate.
“In a world where we spend nearly half of our workday in meetings, this report demonstrates how much professionals appreciate the increased productivity and flexibility they gain from video conferencing,” said Stu Aaron, chief commercial officer at Blue Jeans. “The savings of not traveling from New York to San Francisco or Los Angeles reaches beyond dollars and cents. Video-meetings spare people hassles at airports and anxiety while offline during a flight. Even for those who do have to travel, video conferencing makes it possible to stay better connected and engaged with their colleagues back home, rather than becoming a second class citizen on the dark end of a phone line.”
Blue Jeans states that its customer base includes thousands of businesses, from small companies to the Fortune 50, whose employees are increasingly choosing video conferencing for collaboration with colleagues, partners and customers.
