We now spend 5x more time in virtual meetings than we did before the pandemic

State of Virtual Meetings 2021 — insights and tips on improving your virtual meetings

Since March 2020, companies have moved to remote work, and virtual meetings have become more popular than ever. We’ve started to meet via Zoom, MS Teams, Google Meet, and other platforms to collaborate and perform work-related tasks despite being geographically distributed. To learn more about how our work habits and meeting behavior changed over the past 12 months, we partnered with Polly and other great teams to survey more than 500 knowledge workers from different industries and countries about their remote work experiences.

Here is a quick peek at what the study revealed:

1. We spend 5x more time in virtual meetings than we did before

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, knowledge workers reported spending 2 hours each week in virtual meetings. Now the average time has increased to 10 hours per week.

2. Zoom fatigue is real

37% of respondents report “meeting fatigue” as their biggest challenge. And almost 25% of respondents cite “personal connection” as their biggest challenge in virtual meetings.

Tip: As it has become more difficult to create meaningful connections over video calls, you can leverage tools like Warmly to ‍make virtual meetings feel more like coffee chats. Warmly helps Zoom users to build deeper relationships by providing instant insights on what you have in common with customers, clients, prospects, and teammates.

3. The freedom to meet from anywhere is an important benefit

Nearly 70% of our respondents said that the ability to “meet from wherever you are” is the top advantage of virtual meetings. And 12% of respondents said that the ability to record and document meetings for others is an important plus.

4. We don’t mind being recorded if it’s helping our customers, partners, and colleagues

The survey indicates that the majority (nearly 50%) of respondents don’t seem to care at all about being recorded. Only 1.2% had really negative feelings about it. And 40% of the respondents reported positive feelings about meetings being recorded. Indeed, meeting recordings and transcripts allow team members in different timezones to stay on the same page and contribute to the discussion, even if they couldn’t attend the meeting live.

Tip: Looking for a way to record and transcribe your virtual meetings? Try our Colibri app for Zoom for free! Colibri will record your meetings, transcribe them in real time, and generate concise, searchable meeting notes that can be easily shared with others.

5. Almost 90% of us multitask during meetings. And the most common distractors are…

Nearly 90% of respondents admitted they multitask during meetings. 75% of multitaskers reported being distracted by other work-related tasks, 68% are checking email, and 50% are messaging.

Tip: Meeting organizers looking to lead more engaging meetings should consider tools like Polly. Polly allows users to instantly create and share polls within Zoom, turning one-way presentations into rich, interactive experiences.

For the complete list of takeaways and more data, download the full State of Virtual Meetings report.