The Evolution Of Meetings

Remote working has officially become part of our norm as the ongoing pandemic has forced millions of workers to conduct their operations from home, and with this has been the wide adoption of video conferencing tools, such as Zoom. In fact, the company said it had 300 million meeting participants each day in May, leading its valuation to climb to $42 billion.

If there is anything to take away from the evolution of work culture over the past several months, it’s that the integration of collaborative and virtual meeting technology will play a tremendous role in the future of workplace operations.

Does this mean that traditional physical meetings are going away? Not necessarily. There is still a need to have in-person meetings from time to time, but the technology that improves these experiences will be here for the foreseeable future. Now, meetings with employees crammed into one conference room will be replaced with V-shaped configuration and video conferencing tools.

“I would divide virtual meetings into four quadrants: Meeting Importance (highly important, routine) and Information Shared (confidential, non-confidential),” said Shriram Subramanian, founder of governance advisory firm InGovern Research Services. “For routine and non-confidential meetings, one has to adopt their discretion. However, for highly important and confidential meetings (example: board meetings), the Ministry for Corporate Affairs mandates that attendees state in advance that no other person is present in the room and their video camera has to be on throughout the meeting.”