February 15, 2024
Working remotely via virtual events is not a recent trend, despite what it seems at first glance. Since the advent of webcams and chatrooms the concept of digitizing meetings and business has been on a slow but steady rise across the world. Gallup data shows that 39 percent of employees were at least partly accomplishing their tasks through remote work in 2012. That rose to 43 percent in 2016.
Of course, this process went into overdrive in 2020, with virtual events becoming an outright necessity for a functioning business to perform its tasks. It was not long before we acclimated, and it became the new norm. This is a line we can’t uncross.
Now that the inertia holding virtual events back has been forcibly pulled away, there’s little reason for companies to snap back to pre-pandemic numbers. The dynamic was not shifted to something new, but instead accelerated to what it was already headed. Costs, familiarization issues, preconceived notions, and most of the roadblocks are gone. While there might be some shift back as the pressure lessons, it will be just a fraction of the way towards the old status quo. This is now the new norm.
But this is by no means a bad thing. Now that we’re all coming around to the idea of normalizing virtual events it’s easier to see the good that they can do. Time and money saved is a clear consideration. The average businessperson [LD1]attends over 200 meetings in a year, costing the company about $17,000 per employee to send to all those meetings, not including the cost of lost productivity. This can be dramatically reduced by simply conducting the meetings remotely.
Getting all the needed individuals in a single meeting can be a headache, since they are often busy elsewhere and have trouble paying the cost of time away to attend an in-person event. Virtual meetings can streamline those schedules, reduce the time away, and gives planners the ability to work around their schedules with greater precision.
Perhaps more important of all, virtual events have been shown to be potentially more productive than in-person ones. A 2019 report from scheduling developer Doodle shows that near 90 percent of professionals consider badly managed or pointless meetings to be one of their greater frustrations. A trend noticed, online events have a tendency for organization and productive talk. There tends to be less chit chat and making things up as they go along as during in-person meetings. As a result, they are a far better use of company time.
Now that virtual events are set as the new norm the companies that use them need to recognize this. The notion of some manner of this being a ‘lesser’ form of communication than face to face need to be cast aside, sooner rather than later. It should not only be accepted but embraced for the useful tool it is, as many already have come to recognize. Opportunity is in plain sight; it would be to our detriment not to see it.
