Workers are tuning out Zoom as number of meetings grows
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Zoom is still in, but workers are zoning out in meetings. They're increasingly staying on mute through the whole ordeal and turning the camera off, according to new research published in Harvard Business Review.
Why it matters: A lack of participation in virtual meetings could be a sign that a worker is on her way out, or that there didn't need to be a meeting at all.
Zoom in: Turning the camera off in a virtual meeting is correlated with employee attrition, per the research, from an analytics firm called Vyopta, which looked at data from 2023 and 2022 covering more than 40 million meetings at 11 large companies.
- Workers who wound up leaving their company within a year had their cameras on just 18.4% of the time in small group meetings; those who remained at the company longer were on camera 32.5% of the time.
The researchers also found:
- Participation in meetings has dropped. In 2023, the share of workers who stayed muted for the entirety of a meeting was 7.2%, up from 4.8% in 2022. Camera enablement rates fell slightly, too.
- Workers are doing a lot more meetings. In 2023, workers attended 10.1 virtual meetings a week, down slightly from 10.3 in 2022 — but higher than in 2021 when the number was 8.3 and more employees were working from home.
Our thought bubble: If the number of meetings is going up and participation is down that may be a sign that there are too many meetings and people are feeling Zoom fatigue.
The bottom line: Meetings have always left a lot to be desired, but before the Zoom times, it was hard to analyze how they worked and make targeted improvements.
- Now some large employers are starting to use data gleaned from virtual meetings to make improvements — with an eye toward employer productivity and retention.
