The Challenges of Virtual Meetings In 2023

William Shakespeare didn’t do remote or hybrid work. If he did, he might have had Hamlet say, “To meet or not to meet, that is the question.” Because if virtual meetings had consumed his days, Hamlet would have never gotten to the bottom of all his reflections, and we wouldn’t have the benefit of his profound insights. 

Depending on whom you ask, virtual meetings today are a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, UCaaS technologies enable millions of workers to work from home. But, on the other, it’s created a significant rise in meeting frequency, a decrease in productivity, lost spontaneity between colleagues and a consequent increase in “Zoom Fatigue,” described as “tiredness, worry or burnout associated with the overuse of virtual platforms of communication.” Indeed, according to a 2021 study conducted by Virtira, 49 percent of US employees experienced virtual meeting fatigue.  

And management views the increase in meetings as a drag on productivity.  

“Surveys indicate that even before the pandemic, executives and managers said that meetings prevented them from being productive,” said Guy Yaffe, Vice President VP of Recording Business Line at AudioCodes. “No doubt that has doubled, if not tripled, during and after the pandemic,” he said. 

Hybrid and Remote, Cubicle Life Is Almost Extinct

The hybrid workplace creates challenges for enterprises. The question now is how do we conduct productive meetings? 

Once upon a time, employees could walk down the hall to ask a colleague a quick question. No more. Today, asking a colleague a question can involve scheduling a 30-minute video call. 

“Employees used to be able to walk 30 seconds to a colleague’s cubicle to ask a question,” Yaffe said. “Now everything is much more formal. Plus, there are hundreds and hundreds of emails, IM’s and WhatsApp messages. It’s a very challenging workplace environment,” he explained.  

Recording to the Rescue

With advances in recording, remote and hybrid teams capture everything discussed, including IM’s and emails. Sales teams review customer calls and coach their teams to improve. Information is stored and can be searched by topic and keyword. It’s a centralized repository which becomes the company’s knowledge base, allowing employees to recapture and analyze the entire range of company topics.  

“Within five seconds, I can find every one of my emails from ten years ago or every idea I had when I worked in R&D,” Yaffe said. “Recording adds tremendous value to the organization,” he explained. 

Better still, employees can set up alerts and notifications based on keywords about important customers or strategic topics. That way, they don’t have to attend every meeting. 

AudioCodes Transforms Meetings into Knowledge

With AudioCodes, companies can establish a complete record of every meeting, IM, and employee notes. 

Meeting Insights is an organizational productivity solution which captures information from in-room and remote participants. It creates a meeting summary by logging all action items, notes, decisions made and a final meeting summary. Its Voice AI provides Speech-to-Text (STT) and Keyword Spotting (KWS). In short, Meeting Insights is an organization’s repository and archiving application for all the ideas shared in meetings with advanced search capabilities. 

To meet regulatory compliance demands, AudioCodes offers SmartTAP 360⁰ Live is an enterprise compliance-recording solution for Microsoft Teams. It records all voice, video and IMs interactions for later-stage AI analysis. 

Click here to learn more about Meeting Insights and SmartTap 360 Live. It’s time to get the most out of your company meetings.