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Meetings
The changing face of
modern meeting culture
Blue Jeans, a web-based
videoconferencing provider, has
compiled data from more than one
million customers in 177 countries
and a survey of 391 business decision-
makers to create a snapshot of
meeting habits in 2014.
The company’s latest
State of the
Modern Meeting
study highlights how the
growing mobility of today’s workers and
greater use of technology are re-shaping
meeting culture.
Key findings are that one third of all
business meetings now include a mobile
participant and that use of cloud-based
video-conferencing has grown explosively.
Use of the Blue Jeans service has increased
by 400% in the last 12 months.
Blue Jeans says that growing
demand for its service reflects the
importance people attach to face-to-face
communications – more than seven out of
10 (71%) respondents believe they have
lost a deal due to a lack of face-to-face
interaction – as well as people’s preference
for converged solutions that integrate
audio- video- and web-conferencing.
Its data shows that 39% of video-
centric meetings have at least one
audio-only participant; and that 30%
of video-centric meetings now include
screen/content sharing for presentations,
documents or video-clips.
Commenting on the findings, Blue
Jeans Network chief commercial officer
Meetings are going mobile, according to Blue Jeans’ latest survey of meeting practices
them the most productive meeting
days of the week.
n
Six out of 10 meetings (59%) start late,
with CEOs, CTOs and founders being
the most likely to join a meeting after
everyone else.
n
Major sporting events cause a
significant drop in UK meetings. During
Wimbledon 2013, there was a 15% drop
in weekday meetings across the country.
n
Winter storms resulted in 20% more
video and phone conferences than a
typical day.
n
Scots hold longer meetings, averaging
46 minutes compared with 38 minutes
in the South and 36 minutes in the
North of England.
n
There is a 60% reduction in meetings
the day before a holiday and a 118%
increase the day after.
n
25% more meetings take place in
February than any other month of the
year.
n
Weekend meetings have declined
by more than a third in the past six
months, from one in 10 to one in 15
meetings taking place at the weekend.
n
Three times more participants join a
conference using a mobile phone at
6 p.m. as at 5 p.m.; and two times as
many at 7 a.m. as at 8 a.m.
Blue Jeans, which has a 30% share of
the global business video conferencing
market, provides a cloud-based, scalable,
easy-to-use service for face-to-face video
meetings and rich content sharing across a
wide range of conference rooms, desktops
and mobile devices.
It can connect both business and
consumer video conferencing tools,
including TelePresence, video room
systems (H.323), SIP, Skype, Google,
Microsoft Lync, browsers, tablets,
smartphones and audio callers, into one
single meeting.
Customers in the UK range from large
corporations and local government to
entrepreneurial start-ups and include
Newcastle University, Forum for the
Future and Pole Star, a leading provider
of fleet management, ship security and
fisheries monitoring systems.
meeting/uk
...more than
seven out
of 10
respondents
believe they
have lost
a deal due
to a lack of
face-to-face
interaction...
Stu Aaron said: “If an in-person meeting is
not an option, more than half of business
professionals prefer a video meeting over
an audio-only meeting. This new way
to collaborate means that bad weather,
budget cuts, holidays and a geographically
scattered team are no longer threats to
business productivity as you can easily
conduct face-to-face meetings with nearly
any device – from any location.”
Other findings from the study include:
n
Women attend 14% more meetings
than men and are 12% more likely to
attend meetings on weekends than
male counterparts.
n
An average business meeting lasts 45
minutes and has five participants.
n
41% of meetings take place on
Tuesdays andWednesdays, making
I see what you’re saying
Video conferencing is not just useful for business
meetings. Translation and interpretation agency
Convocco is also using it to deliver high-performance
interpreting services online.
Convocco’s WebInterpreter provides online video
interpreting as an economical alternative to face-to-face
interpreting. The service saves customers the time and
expense of finding an interpreter and paying them to visit
their offices, whilst also giving access to a greater range of
languages.
WebInterpreter can interpret 250 languages, including British
Sign Language, and makes use of 6,000 interpreters, some with
expertise in sectors such as medicine and law.
