My initial response is to wonder if meetings have truly gone up over the last 2 years or is it the ability to truly track these online sessions that reflect the reality we experienced in-person? I had many “drop-in” meetings that never got into my calendar, yet a quick Zoom or Teams conversation is noted. I think people are finally seeing what we have always known. Curious what you have observed or think!
Hi Bill @WJRyan ,
Well noted! If we record each just-in-time meeting, including quick not scheduled Zoom meetings, a graphic would likely show a huge increase. I have observed scheduled meeting bloat beginning to happen long before the pandemic arrived. I noticed Zoom and MS Teams and the like, providing an easy way to schedule interview meetings at almost any date/time. With the adoption of the Zoom platform meetings significantly increased pre-pandemic and definitely during the pandemic.
I’ve also heard the term Zoom fatigue mentioned in academia, a term that really didn’t exist before the pandemic. Coupled with F2F meeting fatigue, Zoom fatigue seems to consequentially maybe even marginalize the important of actual place or space-based work. Meetings are indeed part of work culture for many reasons including social/emotion culture, but realistically, we are like the willing victims of technology innovation for better or worse. A few years ago my former leader put logistic and financial constraints on how many meetings we could attend outside the university each year. She didn’t address Zoom as it wasn’t an issue at that time. I enjoyed reading the many comments to your post!
Having used videoconferencing and then moved to early WebEx to teach at a distance the “fatigue” was known and models such as allowing participants to turn off their cameras when not actively engaged (in a break-out room or talking in larger group) were recommendations known but not widely distributed, of course the whole world wasn’t online at the time either! We’re also seeing the size of the group aligns to in-person studies too, more than 10 are 1-way data dumps (think lectures or staff meetings) and smaller groups are able to interact and act more (seminars and task teams). Bottom line is we’re seeing (IMHO of course!) the NSD (no significant difference) model all over again.