Why Virtual Meetings Can Be More Productive Than Face To Face Meetings

It’s interesting, despite all the early challenges with setting up and figuring out how to use teleconferencing tools, online meetings have quickly evolved into very efficient results oriented events which produce more value per hour than the old fashioned low tech face to face meetings.  Yes, there will always be challenges with network interruptions and computers that are slow and bugs in software, but overall the results after just one month focused solely on virtual meetings shows that we have advanced to being much more productive.  Based on what criteria?  Here are some key observations, you be the judge:

• Meetings start on time.  Everyone joins at or prior to the beginning of the meeting, if not they get notified instantly with popups, sounds etc on their workstation (their portal to the world).  It’s a lot easier and faster to get a hold of people these days.  It’s very apparent who is there  / not there.  No more delays from people walking between buildings or rooms or needing to go back to their desk to get files or being stopped along the way and drawn into another informal meeting.  
• Meetings are focused and get right to the point.  Virtual meetings are more likely to have written agendas.  No one wants to stare at a blank screen and no one wants their face dominating the screen either.
• There are fewer distractions during virtual meetings.  Yes there are some noisy kids and pets from time to time, but newer technologies and software are providing noise cancelling functionality to reduce this and people have become more proficient with muting when they are not speaking.  During face to face meetings, there are a lot of things to draw people's focus from what is being presented, such as: what others are wearing, what’s going on in the hall, where they have to go next, or is everyone staring at me?  Focusing on a laptop or mobile device tends to draw people totally in to the point where other distractions get tuned out, much like kids get totally absorbed in online games and older kids get absorbed in social media.  So why not get people absorbed in participating in the meeting by hosting it on an addictive device?
• Presentations can be easier to read with screen sharing vs. tinkering with the projector while it is too faded, out of focus, not recognizing your input, set for different refresh rate….  Also during virtual meetings, no one is the person in the back who can’t read the slides because they are too far away.
• Side conversations are minimal or nonexistent.  Conferencing software makes it apparent if side conversations are going on and also enables the organizer to mute folks who are creating background noise that shifts the focus of the meeting audio.  This prevents a lot of tangents from extending the meeting and diluting the results in the process.
• If someone does get interrupted with an urgent text or email, it's easier to reply on the same device you are already focused on, rather than shift your focus from the meeting presenter to pulling out a phone or opening a laptop and then navigating to the message.
• Everyone has their notes, files and technology at their fingertips so if additional information is needed during the course of the meeting, someone can look it up and find it in real time and this can facilitate value added results, rather than making these follow ups or parking lot items.
• Meetings end on time, or earlier.  Given the improvements in focus and efficiency, virtual meetings tend to be shorter than their in person counterparts, sometimes lasting less than 50% of the time duration of an in person meeting.  
• Meetings can be back to back.  You can end a meeting at 02:00 and then login to the next meeting within 30 seconds.  No more lost time waiting for people to make their way over from another meeting somewhere else.  
• Virtual meetings are more likely to result in actions and/or decisions.  With limited time to chatter on and engage in side conversations, the outcome of the meeting is more likely to be a definitive action and/or decision as the participants are more focused and engaged in the core meeting content and with shorter meeting durations, people are more likely to be paying better attention and less likely to tune out vs. in person meetings which can drag on, leaving people's minds to wander as they get increasingly bored and/or impatient.
• No need to reserve a conference room.  It's hard enough to find a time when everyone is available, then you also need to find when the much sought after conference room is available, and often times this pushes meetings out sometimes by several weeks.  Virtual meetings typically happen much sooner and are calendar driven so no one forgets when it is and no one gets lost going to the wrong conference room.

The fact is, that even face to face meetings involve using technology - when was the last time you had to figure out how to connect to a conference room projection system?  Or pulled a presentation off the cloud?  So we already need to use these tools anyway.  This is just the next step in the evolution and the results look extremely promising.