Is Video Now the Least Popular Communications Tool?

As the UC and collaboration industry knows better than anyone, workplace communication in 2023 takes myriad forms.

But as hybrid working establishes itself as the new standard and innovations in UCaaS technology continue to accelerate, which form of communication is the most (and least) popular among workers and leaders?

This has been on UC Today‘s mind for some time, so it decided to pose the question to readers, collaborators and industry leaders on LinkedIn.

600 LinkedIn professionals responded to the opinion poll; “Which communications method would you lose?” The options provided were video, email, messaging and voice. 35 percent said they would ditch video, 32 percent said email, 18 percent said messaging and 16 percent said voice.

The perhaps surprising inference from the poll is that despite its ever-growing prominence over the last few years and its explosion as a tool during the pandemic, video lags in popularity compared to its competition — or potentially because of those factors.

But does that align with our experts’ analysis?

“I think the challenge is not video per se,” said Evan Kirstel, Social Media Strategist at BCStrategies. “I think it’s the back-to-back neverending stream — pun unintended — of video meetings that are in our calendars all day. Video fatigue as a psychological phenomenon is real. You just can’t be overwhelmed by eight hours of that kind of focused camera on you without psychological impact.”

“We’re overwhelmed by meetings in general, and the problem now is we’re overwhelmed by video meetings. There needs to be a more thoughtful approach to those.”

Kirstel also understood why email was second-from-bottom in the opinion poll, citing how little impact the revolution of collaboration, video and productivity tools has made on a method that hasn’t dramatically changed much since the 1990s.

“Email is still email,” Kirstel argued. “It’s still a hot mess. I look forward to someone reinventing email. That would have a far greater impact on our productivity in a meaningful way. There’s been innovation at the edges. Maybe AI is going to come to our rescue and save us from our email inbox.”

“I was definitely surprised that video was top as what people would give up,” commented Irwin Lazar, President at Metrigy. Lazar and Metrigy have performed multiple research studies around the “hypothesis” that we as a working culture have reached “peak video” — that, as Kirstel discussed, the average worker is experiencing video fatigue and would like to have fewer video meetings.

“It’s tiring if you have back-to-back calls,” Lazar expanded. “We see companies put in mandatory 15-minute blocks and have meeting-free times and meeting-free days, so you’re not sitting on video because video is obviously a more intensive way of meeting with people vs when you’re on the phone, where maybe you can get up and walk around.”

However, Lazar noted that Metrigy’s research didn’t observe anything that could be construed as a decline in video, despite the presence of fatigue.

“We saw more than 60 percent of companies say video use has increased over the last year,” Lazar said. “We saw roughly 35 percent say video is critical and that they can’t tolerate any downtime. We did hear 18 percent say they’re dealing with video fatigue, and they’re addressing it in the ways we talked about. Mostly through shorter meetings than the standard one-hour block. Meeting-free blocks and so on.”

Dominic Black, Head of Research at Cavell Group, made the insightful point that generational differences have an impact on who prefers which form of workplace communication: “Our generational research we did a couple of months ago, one of the questions was, ‘What communications channel is your preferred way to communicate at work?’ The thing that came bottom was video.”

“We were surprised as well,” Black continued. “Even when we look at Gen Z and Millenials, especially Gen Z, with whom everyone goes, ‘Oh, they only want to use video’. It’s true in their personal lives that they use video a lot more than any other generation. But in a work environment, they really don’t like using it. Typically, it’s a lot of pressure for them to use video calls.”

Black suggested that Millenial and Gen Z aversion to video calls could partly stem from the origins of video’s growth to prominence — namely, that these demographics first encountered the method sitting in their bedrooms during the pandemic. “It wasn’t a great environment for them, it didn’t look professional to be on, and it was a real pressure for them,” Black said. “I wasn’t surprised that video came quite low down.”

The Gen Z and Millennial workforce might be experiencing some residual discomfort with video lingering on from that traumatic period that affected everyone’s lives.

As with Kirstel and Lazard, Black also observed the trend of video fatigue and whether it’s the volume of meetings or their effectiveness that makes them unpopular: “We also talked about the number of meetings that we have to do. If you broke that down and said, ‘Well, do you not like being on video because you do too much of it or because it’s not as useful as the other methods’ I think that’s something we definitely are interested in looking at.”

Black argued that generational difference also matters with phone, which is particularly interesting given its winning popularity in UC Today‘s poll. Black cited Cavell’s findings that only 24 percent of Gen Z use their phone every day for calling if they have a phone number, while that number grows to 62 percent for Baby Boomers.

“It’s a growth trajectory going up like that by age. The older you get, the more preferable a phone call gets over a video call. That’s their preferred medium. Different generations speak different languages about this.”

Communication preferences are key, and Black asserted that the UCaaS, collaboration and CCaaS industries are adjusting to this new reality.

“I think it also comes down to everybody having their own preferences for wanting to communicate,” Black insisted. “We’re seeing it in the contact centre just now as well, where we’re bringing in multiple different channels, and the whole view is, ‘If someone wants to contact you through this medium, we allow you to do that’. I think that’s going to shift more and more in enterprise communications, externally and internally.”