Enterprises faced with lockdowns quickly adapted their meeting strategy with services like Teams or Zoom, and now that some have started bringing workers back, they’ve found that it’s really not too difficult to shift between in-person and video meetings. Many were surprised when some workers expressed a new preference for in-office work, and companies looked into why that was; they discovered the problem of the pair.
Workers say that two-party meetings, the call-into-my-office or pop-into-the-cubicle meetings, are by far the most common kinds of meetings, and my own 2018-2019 study found that pairwise collaboration made up over three-quarters of all collaborations. It’s these most-common meetings that workers say work better face-to-face (F2F), and the reason behind their preference is a combination of scheduling hassles and the whiteboard feature.
