The Future of Work & Meetings in 2023

The landscape of the working world has seen an incredible amount of change over the past few years. Although much of that change has been positive, such as reduced costs for remote work and improved work-life balance for employees, some aspects of company life, such as meetings, now pose new challenges.

With workforces becoming increasingly hybrid or fully remote, it's important for organizational leaders to keep an eye toward the future in order to understand how they can host constructive and engaging meetings in this new work environment.   

Remote and Hybrid Are Here to Stay

In 2023, there may be more workers returning to the office in some capacity, but that return will likely be part of a hybrid work format, rather than a full return to the traditional in-office schedule that dominated prior to the pandemic. 

The ability to maintain productivity in a way that costs less for employers and offers more convenience to employees has made remote and hybrid a fixture in the working world that is likely only to increase in prevalence.

Incorporating New Technology

Many organizational leaders looking to strengthen communication and engagement in their meetings in 2023 will likely start looking into new technology that has been designed with the modern work environment in mind. 

While apps like Zoom have done a serviceable job thus far in hosting remote/hybrid workplace meetings, they are not without their limitations. For instance, there's very little interaction or collaboration with Zoom meetings, which can drastically reduce engagement. 

Those limitations are what Kaon Interactive seeks to provide solutions to, with software like LiveShare and other digital collaboration tools catered specifically for B2B enterprises and their unique needs around both team collaboration and complex selling in a digital environment. Kaon's CEO, Gavin Finn, shared his take on what the future of collaboration looks like for 2023 in the enterprise realm. These are his thoughts on fostering productivity in a remote environment.

Key Ingredients to Productive Collaboration Among Teams Remotely 

Remote teams can be highly productive, as has been proven across industries and disciplines over the past three years. There is more to collaboration than technology, however, and management teams have learned that effective remote collaboration involves a multi-dimensional approach. The three key elements focus on people, process, and technology. 

From the people perspective, recognizing the individual characteristics of different team members, as well as their time zone differences, work schedule variations, and physical work environment is crucial. For some team members, working on a remote basis with a technical collaboration platform comes naturally. For others, transitioning away from in-person collaborations is more challenging, and consequently managers must account for the learning and working styles of each team member on a personalized basis.  

Because much of the remote work happens asynchronously, with some limited amount of synchronous collaboration, it follows that processes tend to be designed to include both individual contribution aspects and concurrent, shared discussions and collaborations. Those times when people are working and communicating with each other synchronously (i.e. in real-time, all together) must be planned and managed to make the most of the time and to ensure that these sessions are designed to solve problems or make progress when that real-time collaboration is most needed. (Just as in the face-to-face world, unnecessary meetings are frustrating and counterproductive.) 

From a technology perspective, a significant mistake that managers make is to assume that remote collaboration is all about video (and audio) connections. For most remote collaborations to succeed, the teams need more than just a video conferencing tool. They also need a separate shared workspace (e.g., an application, or digital environment) where the team members conduct their work - both asynchronously and, critically, when they are in synchronous real-time collaboration meetings/sessions. The shared workspace should allow for substantive content to be viewed, analyzed, and modified in a non-linear way, but allowing for concurrent real-time multi-user interactions.  

For teams to truly be productive in real-time meetings/discussions/brainstorming sessions, collaboration must involve active participation on the part of all remote team members. When everyone is active, then their attention is focused on the group collaboration, and they have the cognitive space to listen, comprehend, and contribute. The video and/or audio channel is one communication method, but it has its limitations, and needs to be augmented with digital environments that can facilitate multi-user real-time collaboration. 

Hybrid Collaboration Done Right Leads to Innovation

When planned and executed well, hybrid collaboration can result in innovative and creative problem-solving synergy between all team members.  While there is nothing that fully replaces in-person relationship-building, hybrid collaboration can include many elements of necessary communication and team-building capabilities.  The trade-offs made when evaluating these decisions include: 

Access

How many of the team members could have been physically present, of the meeting were all in-person, and would some have been left out because of travel restrictions or other reasons?

Cost

Would it be more expensive to bring people together physically? - travel, lodging, meals, etc.

Time

Would all of the steps in getting to the physical meeting add up to a great deal more time spent by each participant getting to the meeting, rather than just the time spent in the meeting itself?

Effectiveness/Innovation/Creativity 

This can help the team members be as effective in generating new ideas, building off each other's thoughts, identifying serendipitous or unplanned opportunities for ideation when they are not in-person together. 

The answers vary, of course, but it is clear that there are circumstances when the factors could lead to either conclusion. With the right people, tools, and processes, it is entirely possible to develop innovative and creative problem-solving or design sessions in a hybrid mode. It is also true that for some teams, and some specific problems, a better result would be achieved with an in-person meeting.   

Technology & Meetings Need to Be Engineered For Remote Work 

Most remote meetings currently center around a video conferencing solution. In these sessions the technology itself, while significantly advanced compared with previous generations, has flaws and limitations. In some cases, audio and video quality is so poor (due, in some cases to the software itself, bandwidth restrictions, limitations of older computing devices, etc.) that much of the meeting is spent repeating and clarifying the oral communications, or re-connecting when connections are lost.   

In addition to the technology, remote meetings are not well-designed for collaboration - rather, they are sequences of people speaking (or even presenting, using slides) while everyone else is passively listening.  This results in an enormous loss of focus and attention, with the consequence that there is very little knowledge retention after the meeting. People are easily distracted in general, but in these kinds of meetings, where the video conference is happening on the same computer as their email and social media, for example, the opportunity for distraction is exponentially increased. 

These are the precise reasons why we developed LiveShare for our enterprise clients. It provides the combination of cutting edge AV technology along with a virtual environment for collaboration that is immersive and engaging for every participant rather than passive. 

Leaders Must Use Multi-Channel Engagement

Leaders must now learn to engage with audiences in a multi-channel manner. Some leaders have been highly effective at building rapport with people because of their in-person charisma and ability to connect by looking people in the eye, shaking hands, etc.  In online channels, those skills are not as applicable, and are difficult to replicate.   

For hybrid collaboration, effective leaders focus on all participants equally, learning to engage with individuals and groups in the manner that suits both the person and the channel. Simple techniques, such as reminders that not everyone is in the same physical space and remembering to include remote team members in the collaboration discussion are critical to building trust and leading hybrid teams. 

Solving The Modern Challenge Of Engaging In-Person and Remotely Simultaneously

Sales meetings have traditionally been centered on a presentation that the sales team makes to the prospect. This has been the case for in-person meetings, and that format carried through when the pandemic required that the vast majority of sales interactions be conducted online.  In either case, the fundamental paradigm has been flawed, in the sense that most prospects do not want to be presented to, but rather, they are looking for a dialogue and conversation. As a result, when prospects are passively listening to or watching a sales presentation, they lose attention very quickly, and the consequence is that memory retention degrades dramatically. In fact, research has shown that a mere hours after a typical sales presentation, only around 20% of the information presented can be remembered by the prospect. (That number is far lower after a day.) 

The effectiveness of sales presentations in an online format (e.g., video conference with screen sharing) is even lower than those that are conducted in-person, because people are much more distracted when participating in video conference meetings. Emails come in with notifications, social media posts announce themselves, and other work is literally right there for people to do. As a result, there is a loss of focus and attention, so the memory retention and understating of content in a slide presentation/video is even lower than the 20% for in-person meetings. 

When sales meetings are hybrid, they suffer from the challenges of keeping everyone in the meeting focused and paying attention, and this is exacerbated by the multi-channel nature of the attendees.   

The solution to this conundrum is to engage all participants in the meeting - both digitally and using analog processes for those in the same room.  For example, by using shared workspaces, whiteboards can be accessed by everyone, and can form the focal point for discussions. Another effective solution is to allow participants to use interactive digital applications for communications and discovery - in a collaboration mode, so that everyone can be in the same "digital space" but experience the discussion in a highly personalized and non-linear manner.  Think of the experience of being on a museum tour - the guide may bring the entire group through a particular exhibit, where everyone is seeing the same objects on display, but they each see it from their unique point of view. Then, the guide may disperse the group to explore on their own, and at their own pace.  In this way, the key information is conveyed in a consistent manner, but everyone is engaged and can delve into those areas of interest themselves and can also share that experience with fellow group members, if appropriate. 

These shared digital collaborative approaches work in-person and remotely and are when integrated with video and audio capability are ideal for hybrid sales meetings. In this new paradigm, everyone is focused and engaged, so they are paying attention and their memory retention and understanding skyrockets, compared with traditional sales presentations.