- Hybrid meetings can leave remote workers feeling left out, Jabra study finds
- Inadequate and outdated configurations regularly lead to meeting delays and technical outages
- Better meeting room kit and clear meeting objectives could improve engagement
About half of remote participants report being forgotten, talked about or excluded during hybrid meetings, a new study from Jabra has found, indicating that hybrid in-person and remote meetings may not be as effective as we thought.
The problem is especially evident when multiple participants are in a physical room and others join online. But even more so, women (16%) and young workers (26%) are more likely to feel excluded.
But it may not be the concept of hybrid that’s the issue: Jabra says that outdated technology makes it difficult for all participants to have equal visibility, and that poor technology only amplifies existing cultural issues around visibility rather than creating them.
Hybrid meetings are the least effective
This is evidenced by the fact that hybrid meetings generally fare worse than fully remote meetings, with workers more likely to miss content (59% vs. 41%), feel left out (55% vs. 38%), or need follow-up meetings to clarify details (42% vs. 28%).
Years after workers were sent home at the height of the pandemic, companies are still failing on their meeting technology. Three in four hybrid meetings experience at least one technical outage, and participants often report difficulty hearing (73%) or seeing (68%) participants.
Jabra even claims that these failures add an average of 11 minutes to each hybrid meeting, and that losses can further increase for larger companies.
This is because workers spend an average of eight hours per week in meetings (more than in Denmark, India and the UK).
While more than half (58%) of this time is generally considered unnecessary, 66% leave without clear action steps and 59% require follow-up to clarify missed points.
Meeting infrastructure and purpose are the keys to success
As for the fix, many companies have turned to AI to help with areas like meeting summaries and live transcriptions, but its widespread use remains low. Lack of trust and privacy and compliance concerns also prevent companies from going all-in on AI.
“AI can make a meeting run smoothly, but it can’t fix a broken meeting,” said Holger Reisinger, senior vice president of Jabra’s enterprise video business unit.
To address this issue, the report urges companies to invest in meeting room technologies such as microphones, cameras and connectivity to bring remote participants closer to in-person participants.
Currently, 37% use a single laptop as their room mic and speaker, 31% are returning to audio-only after ditching video, and 23% have even called in by phone for audio. A third (34%) also noted that participants were joining on their own individual devices, rather than using a central meeting room system designed to capture all participants.
Jabra is also among a growing number of researchers who have found that workers are experiencing increased Zoom fatigue (42% of workers reach their energy limit within two hours of back-to-back meetings, 83% within four hours), highlighting the need to reframe meetings entirely and only make calls when necessary.
This way, workers are more likely to be alert and actively collaborate with all their colleagues, hybrid or not.
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