Meeting great expectations; behaviour, emotion, and trust

One of the recurring major reasons people are being sent back into the office is because of the quality of interaction that leaders say just cannot be replicated virtually. Collaboration can be formal or informal, and indeed, most watercooler chats, desk catch ups and many other social and information-sharing aspects of the office simply can’t be replicated in virtual environments. And while more formal meetings can be quite effective online, people still get more from face-to-face interactions.

The research data clearly shows that face-to-face interactions are preferred, with in-room users rating their own intergroup interactions more favorably than virtual interactions with remote users. Being in person led to ratings of 56% more engagement, 11% more expressiveness, 8% higher quality of input, 16% more trust and 30% more for clarity of interaction than remote users, regardless of the technology they were using. However, we know that most employees still want to work flexibly. Teams should consider cultural shifts to accommodate for in-room biases, inviting the feedback of those joining remotely.

Meeting experiences are holistic, and need to factor in all participants. When we shifted to remote work, most organizations gave some type of headset and maybe even a webcam to employees to take their meetings online. But even within teams and companies, the technology experience is uneven. According to our 2023 Knowledge Worker Study, surveying over 7000 global employees, 91% are using an online meeting platform like Teams or Zoom, but only 30% use a professional headset for work, and only 8% say that it’s their main device.⁴

Looking at people’s video experiences, in a separate piece of research we conducted in 2022, only 19% of knowledge workers are using a personal webcam.⁵ And back in 2021, 68% of employees we surveyed in our annual global hybrid working research said they would prefer companies to select and provide technology to make the hybrid experience equal.

So, for this study, we were curious about how technology impacts the quality each person can access a meeting with, and wanted to find out how much an equal playing field impacted everyone’s overall collaboration perceptions.

When looking at the combined overall ratings of everyone in the meeting, there was a 27% increase in overall clarity of the technology experience, 16% more trust, 35% more reported expressiveness and a 47% perceived increase in the quality of input from all participants, when everyone was using Jabra equipment. By comparison, when participants were using a competitor video bar and built-in laptop audio, they consistently rated all experience parameters at their lowest scores.

As Dr Noyce explains, “when we think about the diversity of the technology that’s available in relation to virtual meetings, obviously it’s really varied. If you’re in a situation where you can make the most of the incoming stimuli available to you, it gives you the advantage of feeling a part of what’s going on and raises confidence in the quality of information you’re receiving. Ultimately, we’re moving towards trying to facilitate the way in which people interact meaningfully at a level that is close to what it would be like face-to-face.”

Remote workers are often those who feel left out of hybrid meetings. In our 2022 Hybrid Ways of Working global report, 2 in 5 employees said they often felt left out in online meetings. And in the 2023 edition, we saw that Millennials and Gen Z were 2-3x more likely to say they felt left out in meetings.

Our study discovered that when remote users take part in meetings using professional headsets and web cameras, perceptions of the meeting quality increase for everyone. Looking at trust, remote users have a 22% increase in trust for other remote participants who are also using professional technology.

Overall video clarity was also 9% higher for remote participants when everyone was using Jabra, while meeting-room users rated remote users with 32% more expressiveness and 25% higher quality of input in meetings when they were using professional equipment. Overall, we discovered that remote participants who are using Jabra audio and video are perceived by in-room participants to have nearly twice the quality of engagement – 84% – compared to remote collaborators using their laptop’s built-in hardware.

These findings showed the levels to which remote workers can show up and contribute to hybrid meetings, and the advantages, or disadvantages, that technology can give them.

How can we bring people into a meeting room, in a way that gives them the highest opportunity to contribute to a meeting?

Our study discovered that when participants were collaborating using professional in-room and remote technology, remote participants reported a 56% increase in quality of input from those joining from the meeting room than when using a lower-quality video bar. They also reported 16% higher video clarity, and 11% higher trust ratings.

For remote users, the quality of input was rated as highest when those using professional headset and webcams were feeding back on others remote users in the meeting using the same technology. After this, they rated in-room meeting participants using a professional video bar as the second highest. And then thirdly, in-room users rating remote users with video from a professional webcam.

Trust is an enabler for all business. It opens and closes doors, deals and perhaps most importantly, it affects our mental wellbeing and productivity at work.

For remote users, trust is usually harder to form than in person. As Dr Noyce explains, “when people are interacting with each other, there’s a whole range of things going on; our ability to process faces is largely under the governance of dedicated areas in our brain such as the right fusiform gyrus. We are largely driven by visual stimuli, and our occipital lobes that process visual stimuli make up a large proportion of our cognitive make up.

In terms of modern, hybrid meetings we have a very different social structure in place. So, if you’re in-room, you can obviously reference your peers very differently and in a fuller way, than if you’re remote. Some of the technology we’re using has dedicated software that focuses on the face. This obviously means that the face takes up more real-estate on the screen. That greatly enhances our ability to process things like nonverbal cues.”

What we found in the research was that remote participants using and experiencing professional technology report significantly higher levels of overall trust for both other remote users and in-room users. When viewing fellow remote participants who are also using professional video, there was a 22% increase in trust rating compared to those using their built-in laptop audio and video. Looking at the average rating given for in-room and other remote participants, trust is 18% higher when remotes both experience and use professional collaboration technology.