Real meetings - when reality varies

2020 - the year when we were forced to embrace digitalization to enable work meetings.

Despite the social distancing necessary due to the pandemic many organizations have managed to continue their businesses using different digital meeting platforms (Teams, Skype, Zoom, Google Meet).

In many organizations, customers, as well as employees with different competencies, are geographically spread which implies possibilities as well as challenges.

A growing trend is also meetings using virtual technology (VR-meetings) which makes it possible to create an experience which resembles or even enhances the usual physical meeting experience. Much speaks for continued use of the digital meeting forms also after the pandemic has passed. Not least since organizations are increasingly demanded to contribute to a sustainable society by decreasing travels.

As many of us have experienced this past year, it is challenging to transfer the communication logic of physical meetings to the digital and virtual.

Different meeting forms have different communication logics and thus different conditions to contribute to the desired results for task fulfilment, learning and work environment.

This project aims to study physical, digital and virtual meetings in terms of 1) characteristic communication practices 2) consequences for and 3) the meaning for task fulfilment, learning and work environment.

We suggest a cross-disciplinary, collaborative project with two organizations using a qualitative approach in two substudies: a) observation and filming of meetings which enables interaction analysis as well as analysis of written reflections by the participants; b) focus groups about the perceptions of the communication, which enables thematic analysis and a comparative study of the different meeting forms.

Results will be validated in learning workshops with participating partners. The project is relevant for the society by the impact meetings have on organizations work sustainability