The human cost of video meetings — What’s your VCU?
Diving headlong into year 3 of Zoom fatigue, you’re probably wondering how you can make video meetings work better. Grind less. And mean more.
How do we keep our team connected in the new world of mostly-remote? How do we learn from each other? How do we grow as a team? Is video working for us or against us?
We’ve been thinking of a new metric — Video Content Utility (VCU)— a metric that measures the actual value of a meeting and maybe helps your meetings matter.
More on that in a minute.
“This meeting could have been an email.”
It began as a common observation. Then it devolved into a rueful joke.
Now in the video age, it has decayed into a moldy truism: You rally colleagues to answer a question, chew on a problem, and dream up next steps— only to learn you have wasted everyone’s time: To be honest, a Slack chat or email thread would have coughed up the same result.
But it’s not the collaboration format that’s the problem — a video meeting is supposed to gather the right people to explore, cross-pollinate, ideate, plan, and decide.
The problem might be that you’re asking the wrong questions of a meeting — “What should we do? Where are we going? How do we succeed?” — and you’re not thinking of the right ones:
Which brains belong here? What questions should they answer? Who should we digest this for later? What will they want to know?
This is where the notion of VCU gains traction.
Try this:
- Calculate how many hours of video calls you have recorded in the past two years.
- Now think about how many specific moments from those calls your team is sharing, discussing, and learning from.
- And of all those moments shared — how many did your colleagues re-share to educate, edify, illustrate, persuade, clarify and capitalize on, to move your company forward?
That’s how you measure Video Content Utility.
So much of a meeting gets lost in the workday bustle, the weekly noise, the quarterly grind.
If you’re lucky, a great meeting organizer (or at least an excellent notetaker) distills all the creative collaboration and smart ideas that your meeting generated. Maybe they toss out an email that compresses it into clear marching orders — or maybe just a halfhearted summary.
You left behind a lot of value locked up in that recording: Gone are brilliant suggestions from your most creative thinkers that didn’t directly drive the decisions you made—retrievable, shareable ideas that could drive better decisions in your future. Gone are the moments where clever collaboration evolved your strategy, sharpened your tactics.
Gone is the genius that — if you had captured it — could have focused your company’s future and driven you faster towards your goals.
You could pay a smart employee to hand-sift all that video for the moments that matter and bring them to the next meeting. But who can afford that?
Your only hope is that someone — your notetaker? — remembers those moments reliably and brings them to the next meeting like this.
If they are even invited.
Meanwhile, all those moments of incandescent genius stay locked up in your Zoom, OneDrive, or Google vaults, fading in the memories of the few people who happened to be in the meeting.
Next time, everyone’s going to spend the meeting’s first half struggling to remember what really happened and then deciding which parts were important.
Maybe, just maybe, someone will remember the one thing that triggered your decision and somehow got pasted as a string of text in followup email thread, like the faint echo of a single, beautiful musical note.
And on you’ll grind, into yet another Zoom call that could just as well have been an email.
Curious about VCU? Come talk to us. We know how to make it work for you.
Mack Reed is Director of Product Management at CLIPr, guiding the development of the platform’s functionality, user experience, community, and brand.
