Meeting great expectations; behaviour, emotion, and trust

How much is the technology we’re using impacting our behaviour in meetings and our ability to collaborate effectively?

In May 2023, Microsoft revealed that people are in 3x more meetings and calls per week at work, than they were in February 2020 – a 192% increase.¹ The average worker spends about 25% of their day in Teams meetings. Given that there are over 572 million knowledge workers globally², we’re collectively spending billions of hours in online meetings each week. And yet, many of those meetings are taking place in conditions that are far from conducive to collaboration or productivity.

Inefficient meetings are the leading barrier to productivity, according to Microsoft. At the same time, having too many meetings was ranked as the third biggest productivity disruptor.³ Earlier this year, in our Jabra Hybrid Ways of Working 2023 Global Report, we found that how people were seen and heard, as well as how well they could see and hear their colleagues in remote meetings was impacting team trust, creativity and innovation.

Although we’re collectively spending a significant portion of our time in online meetings and there are many calls for a return to office, most meeting rooms still don’t have the right equipment. All of this led us to wonder, how much is the technology we’re using impacting our behaviour in meetings and our ability to collaborate effectively?

Answering that question has taken over a year of work by Jabra at the London School of Economics’ Behavioural Lab, to try and understand the biopsychological impacts of the technology we use in our day-to-day work, and how it impacts our relationships, wellbeing, trust, emotions, and engagement in meetings. This first-of-its-kind behavioural research, in collaboration with the LSE, sheds new light on the subject, and offers some guidance on a better way to meet in a hybrid world.

How much is the technology we’re using impacting our behaviour in meetings and our ability to collaborate effectively?

The research was conducted based on an eight-person hybrid virtual meeting group. With four of the participants sat together in the situational context of an in-room group, which was complimented by an additional four remote participants. The research utilizes a mixed format design centering around two key independent variables, situational context (remote or in-room) and the quality of the audio-visual experience (high quality using Jabra equipment, low quality using generic or competitor equipment).

The study used a diverse range of psychological approaches and measures, ranging from self-report ratings to capture participants’ opinions and feeling, through to highly objective and sophisticated eye-tracking, facial-expression analysis and biological indices of arousal and cognitive load (skin conductance response and endogenous eye blink). Synchronizing and collating the vast amount of data produced was in itself demanding, with each participant producing close to 500 data points per second.

Since mid-2021 through to mid-2023, a return to office debate has been raging. The results are far reaching, as people who have relocated, adjusted to better autonomy and work-life management push back against seemingly hollow mandates. On the other side, leaders push to reach productivity and trust levels they see as possible only through office-based work. Regardless of how this plays out, our meetings are still predominantly facilitated by online tools like Teams, Zoom and Google Meet. They’re also largely hybrid, with some mix of in-room and remote participation. And so how we find better ways to meet, and better technologies to facilitate this, will remain critical in the decade ahead.