Remote meetings help you transcend boundaries without even shaking a leg. With technological advancements and its close integration into the business sector, virtual meetings have eased the process of doing business both nationally and internationally.
But is it only advantageous in all forms? What about the pitfalls faced during technical glitches? To sum it all up, we have prepared a brief review that lists the pros and cons of remote meetings.
Pros
Remote meetings assure flexibility and inclusivity in the work culture. The corporate sector has always been a tech-savvy department that aids in easy adaptation with advancing technology. Although virtual meetings are new, they have geared up enormously in the last 1-2 years.
- Cost and time-effective: Virtual meetings can be attended while sitting in the living room. They have discarded the brick and cement structure concept. It cuts down on the cost of traveling and consequently the time. With such a format, employees can attend meetings from any place with a stable internet connection. Even huge conferences have been conducted online, without the need of a special premise.
- Ease of sharing information: Online platforms have been designed keeping in mind the need of the business and educational sector. With amazing options like screen sharing, posting documents, surveys, and polls, it becomes very easy for every participant to have equal access to information right in front of their computer screen, unlike the printouts practice. Some collaborative tools like Klaxoon aid in increasing the productivity of online meetings with their automated feature that guides each team during the meeting to minimize technical errors.
- Automation: All thanks to state-of-art technologies, which enable features that automate remote meeting management. Scheduling meetings, Sending links to those who register on it, adjustment of audio and video quality as per the internet bandwidth are some of the features that reduce human effort.
- Recording: Imagine you miss an important meeting, and then nobody has the time to summarize; online meetings offer you a recorded version of the entire meeting, which can be watched at any time of the day.
Cons
With pros come the cons, as a rule. Besides inefficient infrastructure and connectivity issues in some geographical locations, making it hard for employees to work consistently, online meetings still have some problems.
- Reduced face-to-face interaction: Human interactions are the most convincing form of communication. It’s easy to identify the intentions of an individual by body language and eye contact. Loss of personalization dampens the importance of a business deal.
- Inefficient management: It’s an art to host an uninterrupted meeting without background noises, notifications, or phone calls. Lack of management results in a failure of communication with unequal opportunities to put forward the opinions. If the meeting deviated off-topic due to disturbances or awkward silence, it’s difficult to derive a conclusion out of the meeting.
- Equipment issues: Not everyone is blessed with a high-quality webcam, which necessitates an external camera and sometimes even a mic. These add on some technical investment which could have been deterred in the case of offline meetings.
- Privacy issues: Every platform that you use to conduct an official meeting is accessible by the technical support of that company. Although encrypted in nature, it is still prone to phishing attacks.
