The Future of Hybrid Meetings
Meetings are typically considered to be the fuel of an organization’s productivity — a place where employees discuss ideas and make collective decisions. But, it is no secret that meetings are also often perceived as wasteful vacuums, depleting employee morale and productivity. Over the last three years, we embarked on a journey to answer a simple yet challenging question (summarized in our CHIWORK position paper). That is, “what makes meetings successful”. To answer that question, we investigated factors associated with meeting experience. We designed a 28-question survey and administered it to 363 individuals whose answers were statistically analyzed. It turns out that three factors captured most of the survey’s variance. The first factor is execution — whether the meeting had a clear purpose, structure, and resulted in actionable items. The second factor is psychological safety — whether participants felt listened to and were motivated to contribute during the meeting. The third factor is physical comfort — whether participants felt physically comfortable by, for example, being in a meeting room with good air quality and sufficient natural light.
Now, let’s see how current technologies support these factors. Most meeting technologies have been focused on supporting execution, while the two other factors have received less attention. Execution is typically supported by, for example, allowing hosts to set agendas, automatically generating action items from dialogues, visualizing participants’ contributions, just to name a few.
Psychological safety is more challenging. The challenge here comes from the inability of online meetings to reproduce the important social cues abundant in offline meetings. In face-to-face interactions, we primarily read faces and body language. All these cues are virtually non-existent in online meetings. To bring the offline experience into the online world, we developed an app called MeetCues that allows meeting attendees to provide real-time feedback by tagging key points as the meeting unfolds and keeping track of action items. These virtual crowdsourced tags were translated into an emoji cloud visualization, allowing attendees to infer the overall meeting “atmosphere”. However, to fully capture the multi-sensory integration (e.g., body cues) of in-person meetings, we integrated wearable devices with the MeetCues app. These devices capture an array of body cues including participants’ heart rates, head and hand movements, and changes in postures. For example, aggregating head movements across all participants serves as a proxy for (dis)agreement, while aggregating changes in postures serves as a proxy for (dis)comfort. These cues helped attendees infer the levels of psychological safety “in the [virtual] room”. MeetCues also captured types of conversations (e.g., a heated discussion resulting in a conflict eventually being resolved, a supportive conversation, an exchange of knowledge). By monitoring these types of conversations during a meeting (or after it), one could potentially measure specific aspects of organizational productivity, and proactively take actions for improvement (e.g., cultivate an approach of conflict resolution).
Physical comfort, in the meeting context, often refers to specific aspects of good air quality. To explore the extent to which air quality alone determined whether a meeting was perceived as productive or not, we developed miniaturized devices, called Geckos, which are fitted with cheap-to-produce sensors capturing light, temperature, and the presence of a broad range of gasses such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs). We integrated Geckos with the MeetCues app, and created a new indoor environmental sensing infrastructure called ComFeel. We deployed ComFeel in a corporate office and gathered data from 29 meetings in different rooms. As one expects, productive meetings were those in which participants felt safe to contribute (35% of perceived meeting productivity was attributed to psychological safety). Surprisingly, productive meetings were also those in which participants felt physically comfortable (25% of perceived meeting productivity comes from air quality). These results suggest that, if a meeting takes place in a stuffy conference room, even if it is run well, people will still struggle to pay attention. To fix that, one just needs to do a handful of things, from manually or automatically adjusting ventilation, lighting, temperature, which could increase a meeting’s productivity by a considerable extent.
Based on these findings, we argue that future research should focus on making meetings more inclusive for everyone by maximizing psychological safety and optimizing physical comfort. A sample of key research questions are reported in the infographic (Figure 1). At the same time though, future work should also consider how these new technologies could inadvertently become surveillance tools. To avoid that, we need to understand how employees judge these technologies, and determine which ones are desirable, and why. We considered 16 technologies that track productivity based on diverse inputs (e.g., tracking audio conversation during virtual meetings, tracking text messages in collaboration tools), and conducted a study in which 131 crowd-workers judged these scenarios. We found that a scenario was judged harshly depending on these three aspects of increasing importance. That is, whether the scenario: 1) was not currently supported by existing technologies; 2) interfered with current ways of working; and 3) was not fit for tracking productivity or infringed on individual rights. If future meeting tools incorporate any kind of employee monitoring, they need to embed Responsible AI principles: preserve individual rights, including that of privacy; ensure non-discrimination, while promoting inclusivity; and, at the same time, provide explainable and human-interpretable outputs (e.g., the decision upon which the system decided, for example, that a meeting was successful or not).
