Meeting Effectiveness and Inclusiveness in Remote Collaboration

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DOI

A primary goal of remote collaboration tools is to provide the most effective meetings possible for all meeting participants. To study meeting effectiveness and meeting inclusiveness, we first conducted a large scale email survey (N=4,425) at a large technology company (pre-COVID-19); using this data we derived a multivariate model of meeting effectiveness and show how it correlates with meeting inclusiveness, participation, and feeling comfortable to contribute. We believe this is the first such model of meeting effectiveness and inclusiveness. The model shows the following factors are correlated with inclusiveness, effectiveness, participation, and feeling comfortable to contribute in meetings: Sending a pre-meeting communication, sending a post-meeting summary, including a meeting agenda, attendee location, remote-only meeting, audio/video quality and reliability, video usage, and meeting size. The model and survey results give a quantitative understanding of how and where to improve meeting effectiveness and inclusiveness and what the potential returns are. Motivated by the email survey results, we implemented a post-meeting survey into a leading computer-mediated communication (CMC) system to directly measure meeting effectiveness and inclusiveness (during COVID-19). Using initial results based on internal flighting we are able to create a similar model of effectiveness and inclusiveness, with many of the same findings as the email survey. This shows a method of measuring these metrics which is both practical and useful in a commercial CMC system.