The following is an excerpt from In Praise of the Office: The Limits to Hybrid and Remote Work by Peter Cappelli and Ranya Nehmeh available now from Wharton School Press. Reprinted with permission from University of Pennsylvania Press.
While there were many changes with remote work, the single most notable one was the shift to remote meetings. As other researchers found in other settings, total meeting time is up compared to the office context, and there are many challenges as to how remote meetings operate.
Completely virtual meetings where all participants are away from an office created more equality for teams that are distributed across time zones: before the pandemic, times were set based on the schedule of the headquarters’ office, and participants elsewhere adjusted. As one employee noted.
“We used to have hybrid meetings with our colleagues in Europe and Asia. An inequality was created. People in the room got to talk before and after the meetings, whereas the remote teammates missed out. Now with the pandemic, people are more conscious of keeping the information symmetric for everyone.”
In other words, because remote meetings start and stop at the same time for everyone, that asymmetry of communication stopped. Put less positively, no one has the opportunity for informal conversation. Another plus was in record keeping: “Now things are more written. And the whole journal is visible.” Virtual meetings often have a written summary, which contributes to documentation and shared memory that could benefit transitions during changes in team composition. Nothing prevented written summaries in the past, of course, and nothing prevents them from being used for in-person meetings, either. Why they developed is a question we consider next.
‘We need pre-meetings to prepare for big meetings’
But most respondents saw problems with virtual meetings that overwhelmed the benefits. The fact that virtual meetings have changed the nature of interactions has been a topic of considerable interest after Covid-19. Research on digital communication patterns across 16 major metropolitan areas in North America, Europe, and the Middle East found that lockdowns led to a surge in meeting and email activity, a decrease in the average length of meetings, an increase in the span of the workday and an increase in the average meeting size. Arguably the most important question about virtual meetings is why overall they appear to take up more time than in-person meetings did. Indeed, the fact that workdays are longer was explained by participants as caused by more time in meetings. They identified reasons why there were more meetings, why they were bigger and longer, and why they were less productive.
First, they noted the problem of meeting overuse. Issues that might have been addressed in an office with a quick “drive-by” conversation in the hall often now required scheduling a virtual meeting. The company was aware of this issue and tried to head it off by encouraging employees to use asynchronous communication, especially the message feature in Microsoft Teams. The fact that responses to prompts on Teams were not always forthcoming was a problem, and it still required a back-and-forth. A common explanation for longer meetings we have heard elsewhere is that it was not possible on some virtual platforms to schedule meetings for less than 15 minutes, which might suggest that a brief conversation might drag out to that limit, but participants indicated that this was not the case. They were able and did end those meetings early.
Second, participants noted that the size of meetings was no longer constrained by office size. “Let’s meet in my office” limits the meeting to a handful of people. Without that, as one employee noted, “it’s easy to add people to a meeting, and people don’t want to be left out.” So, the meetings got bigger. Because the audience was bigger, the meetings became more important for the organizers. As one participant noted that, “we need pre-meetings to prepare for big meetings.” An unintended consequence was that many of the people attending the meeting were not crucial to it and were not really paying attention, an issue we return to here.
The problem with newcomers
One specific group to consider in this context is newcomers. As one participant noted, new hires were “largely being ignored—but drawn into big meetings” because they did not yet have any sense as to which meetings were important for them, and in many meetings, they did not have enough background to know what is going on. A team leader noted a positive aspect of larger, virtual meetings especially featuring senior leaders: “I feel it’s easier to bring new hires to virtual meetings so that there are more opportunities to get exposed to conversations with senior leadership and clients.” But the negative aspects were hard to miss. One was the minimal personal follow-ups. We heard this pushback from a junior employee, “The rumination of those high-stakes conversations afterward when working from home leveled up the stress and anxiety. I have no one to casually talk with when everyone logs off. We need low-stakes interactions with senior colleagues in the company.” The opportunities for newcomers to be in larger meetings may have been more imaginary than real.
Third, respondents identified an important issue for meeting organizers: “You can’t read the room on Zoom when you are losing people.” In face-to-face meetings, moderators could get a sense when people were bored, when the meeting should speed up or when the discussion should slow down. It is hard to read that body language from virtual meeting images. This issue contributed to arguably the biggest problem with remote meetings here, and that is that people are not paying attention. Studies indicate that approximately 30% of meetings at Microsoft involve multitasking, with employees more likely to multitask in larger, longer, and recurring meetings. Multitasking may seem to boost productivity on our own tasks although to do that means we are not paying attention to the meeting and tends to hurt the quality of work on our own tasks. It also causes extra work for teams and managers because participants are not paying attention.
Is multitasking understandable or inappropriate?
One team leader said, “We have to send summaries around explaining what happened in the meeting, and we sometimes need follow-up meetings when people want to talk about what was on the summary.” Research indicates that multitasking during remote meetings does have negative consequences. The most frequently reported issue (36%) is a loss of attention and engagement, as people often lose track of the discussion due to distractions from multitasking. Additionally, multitasking contributes to mental fatigue and negatively impacts overall well-being, with some participants reporting feelings of exhaustion after. Another drawback is that multitasking in remote meetings is sometimes perceived as inappropriate behavior, with some individuals explicitly associating it with being impolite.
A basic reason why we are multitasking and not paying attention in meetings is because the common practice was for cameras to be off for meetings. The rationale behind this norm could relate to emotional labor involved in virtual surface acting: it takes effort to pretend to be paying attention (presumably just as true in the office), but camera off limited the capacity for immediate feedback, information or cues exchanged.
When asked what the participants were doing when their cameras were off, the uniform response was “they are doing other work” or multi-tasking. It seems to give permission for employees to do that. What created the need for multitasking was, as one participant argued, “they have to do their other work then to get everything done.” The problem with the “cameras off” norm and multitasking was that participants did not know what was going on in the meeting, which contributed considerably to the fact that the tasks associated with meetings took so long, and longer meetings in turn created the time squeeze and the need for multitasking. A vicious cycle. We asked in each group how common the norm of cameras off was. It was ubiquitous. The only exception was in some IT teams where they had been having virtual meetings before the pandemic.
We returned to the question of the cameras off norm at the end of the discussion of meeting time to ask whether it wouldn’t be more efficient to have them on so that attendees were paying attention. When there was a response, it was that employees should not have to turn on their cameras if they did not want to: “What if they don’t feel like being on camera that day?” was a response we heard several times in different forms. This reflected a more fundamental shift with the remote work context, the prioritization of meeting individual needs and achieving individual performance goals that we address in more detail in the next chapter. The context of some of the responses suggested that this priority became a norm during the pandemic when children were not in school and working from home was more chaotic. The employer’s understandable and reasonable response during that period was to tell employees to look after themselves and their own needs, and to do what they felt they needed to do to reduce their stress. A few comments from participants pointed out the difficulty in getting “made up” to be on camera, presumably what they were doing before when going to the office.
The cameras-off norm changed a facetime norm: It was now possible to meet the requirement of physically being present without expecting to be mentally present. To the extent that meetings represent a collective activity and the work they were doing when multitasking was an individual activity, the cameras off norm and the multitasking that followed represent a shift from collaborative to individual attention and effort.
Team leaders—supervisors—had the authority to set norms on virtual meetings, and as with many employers, there was no official policy from top leaders on how to run them. The norm of “cameras off” developed during the pandemic, and a camera on policy would mean pushing back on that pandemic norm. As one team leader noted:
“I pushed for camera on, but I didn’t know how to make it happen. Then I gave up. Overall, now people would interpret camera on as being friendly. And when people have their camera off and get through difficult conversations, they turn on the camera to manage conflicts.”
In other words, they recognized the importance of at least trying to read body language. One of the more interesting findings noted in several groups was that this more formal and limited process for interactions via virtual interactions and especially with the “cameras off” norm now favored a model that might benefit introverts or those who prefer less direct social interaction, as remote work minimizes traditional face-to-face engagements necessary in office settings. One participant who identified themselves as an engineer and started working fully remotely before the pandemic told us, “Virtual meetings are easier for introverts because people can’t see social interactions. Presumably introverts are less worried about them as a result. He went on to say: Sales people are good at reading social cues. Being virtual prevents me from unnecessarily revealing too many cues to them.” Another employee added: “This is great for me because I’m more introverted and am happy to be by myself. It is driving my husband nuts because he’s extroverted and doesn’t have many opportunities to interact with others.”
Communication in a remote work environment
Communication gaps extend beyond meetings to everyday workplace interactions especially when being remote. One study of distributed teams found that partners working remotely often misinterpreted silence. Silence could mean many different things for different people, going from strongly agreeing, to strongly disagreeing, or even being ignored. It is hard not to know how to interpret it without close-up knowledge, the ability to read body language, and so forth. A universal finding in studies on distributed work is that these communication problems end up increasing the time it takes to execute projects.
A related study of communication found that supervisors and coworkers may be more reluctant to call those working from home to solve those last-minute issues because of fear of intruding in their life, turning to those in the office instead. This creates fairness concerns about contributions. More generally, we know that remote teams have more conflicts within the team than teams in the office because of communication challenges.
In project teams, the less you are around, the more likely you are to be marginalized. Employees are less likely to respond to team members’ messages on time or to provide access to critical data when they are physically distant from us. Communication barriers seem to be at the heart of this. Distant workers often fail to understand the priorities of their remote peers because it is harder to express those via technology.