Is your video conferencing a boardroom embarrassment?

There are some pretty scary stats about what your employees get up to during video conferences. According to Polly and Zippia, up to 90% of attendees multitask during video meetings. They attend to emails, check out social media, play games and even carry out pet care duties.

But with the rise of the hybrid/remote workforce, video conferencing isn’t going anywhere. If anything, video meetings are becoming more frequent. 83.13% of workers spend up to a third of their week in meetings, and most meetings (41.8% of them) last between 30 minutes to an hour.

You think you’ve got it bad? Executives have it even worse.

A study by Harvard Business Review reports that today’s business executives spend over half their working week (23 hours, to be precise) in meetings. By comparison, in the 1960s, it was closer to 10 hours a week.

The average CEO, says the HBR study, attends at least 37 meetings per week, while other C-level executives attend between 12 and 17 meetings weekly. So, it’s no surprise that 45% of employees, in general, admit to feeling overwhelmed by attending too many meetings. Side note: The HBR study is from 2017, but the stats seem to have changed little since then – executives are still swamped!

After attending meeting upon meeting, you can understand the level of video conferencing fatigue experienced by employees, external executives, and decision-makers alike.

What’s even more worrying, though, is the impact a poor video conferencing experience can have on your brand when it matters most.

Some common bugbears

For many businesses, the rise in video conferencing has outstripped their connectivity and technological capabilities; they’re relying on old gear and old setups. Which is never a great look.

Common attendee complaints include:

• Awful audio: The audio is terrible (this is universally regarded as the most common complaint). Nothing raises stress levels like the inability to hear other attendees, or the time spent trying to ensure everyone can be heard clearly. Ironically, great-quality audio is more important than high-resolution video, as it can more severely impact the overall communication experience.
• Poor video resolution: Attendees struggle to see others, images are slow to load, and video replays are choppy. It’s like traveling back to the 60s.  
• Wasted time (that you’ll never get back again): 33% report that technology and connectivity problems are a leading cause of meeting disruption and wasted time. Meeting time is lost while people fumble under desks, searching for mislaid cables and matching sockets, before eventually finding ‘someone’ from the IT team to help get the video conference on air.
• A late start, again: The average meeting begins 8-12 minutes late. Late start times are cited in research as a key reason that attendees perceive that meetings fail to deliver value, and the cost to executives is almost 3 hours a week (that’s just under 140 hours a year!) in lost time and productivity.
• Sorry about this: Connecting guests’ devices to enable them to present is an embarrassing struggle for all concerned. Life is too short to have to copy a presentation across to an in-house video conferencing-ready device. These days, the expectation is that any BYOD device, regardless of platform, will integrate seamlessly and quickly with your own video conferencing platform.
• The bl**dy internet keeps dropping out: The screen keeps freezing, audio goes in and out, uploads take forever, and it’s just generally painful. While you may be more understanding if the meeting is run from a remote worker’s home office, when it comes to serving up a professional experience from your boardroom, everyone expects (and deserves) more.

So, is your video conferencing a bad brand experience?

While the benefits of being able to video conference over meeting in person with geographically dispersed employees, partners and customers (potential and existing) are obvious, poor delivery can be off-putting and erode their confidence in you.

And when those meetings are back-to-back for so many modern executives, you need to stand out for what you did well, not where you mucked up.

Don’t be remembered for all the wrong reasons

Sorry to say, but addressing staff indifference and distraction due to overly long, too frequent, or excessively tedious internal meetings is an organisational and cultural issue.  That said, the best practice pointers given in the Harvard Business Review article on Meeting Madness make it well worth a read.

What is more easily within your control, though, is dramatically improving the technical quality and delivery of video conferencing from your boardroom. Some leading-edge video conferencing trends include AI-powered assistants to streamline scheduling, provide in-meeting support and summarise events, 5G technology to increase speed and reduce latency issues, and 3D video conferencing.

While there are many amazing new technologies – the one thing we know everyone wants is simply a boardroom video conferencing experience that works. Seamlessly and consistently. One where everyone knows how to use it (and you don’t need to drag your office manager or IT person away from their lunch), and if you need expert support, it’s only a phone call away and comes with a genuine CCT smile.

PS: If you think having a system where the boardroom knows your day better than you do, has its own calendar, and is ready and waiting and constantly ON and working would be nice, just ask!