According to Vyopta, a teleconferencing and collaboration analytics company, remote workers increased their engagement with colleagues between 2020 and 2022, contrary to previous assumptions, a complete contradiction of the age-old rumor that remote employees become less engaged over time.
Vyopta stated that it collected metadata from all Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Webex meetings (with and without webcams) from ten large global organizations (seven of which are Fortune 500 firms) spanning a wide range of industries, including technology, health care, energy, and financial services.
It then concluded that remote meetings have become more common, stating that “60% more remote meetings per employee in 2022 as compared to 2020 (a change of an average of five to eight meetings per week per employee)” It also stated that remote meetings have shrunk in size, with the average number of participants per meeting dropping by half from 20 in 2020 to 10 in 2022.
The combination of these findings paints an intriguing picture: “not that remote workers appear to be becoming less engaged, but rather that they are becoming more engaged with their colleagues in meetings.”
This data also indicates that remote interactions are becoming more similar to in-person interactions. Whereas there have been significant concerns that remote employees are missing out on the laid back and impulsive conversations that happen in-person, these findings suggest that remote employees may be beginning to make up for the absence of those conversations by having more unplanned meetings remotely.
The sources for this piece include an article in TechSpot.