Meetings during COVID-19

A Socially Intelligent Meetings project

In common with companies around the world, from March in 2020 Microsoft employees entered a prolonged period of mandatory working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We wondered what would happen to employees’ effectiveness and collegiality as all meetings went remote. From April through August 2020 we recruited 849 employees to take part in a large scale study involving two month diaries and weekly polls. This ‘natural experiment’ highlighted the everyday reality of the difference in “being there” as against “being remote” in work situations.

We are now analyzing the data and developing publications and other outputs.

Method

• Methodology and Participation for 2020 Diary Study of Microsoft Employees Experiences in Remote Meetings During COVID-19

Findings

• Collaboration and Meetings section in The New Future of Work: Research from Microsoft on the Impact of the Pandemic on Work Practices
  
• Large Scale Analysis of Multitasking Behavior During Remote Meetings (CHI2021 Honorable Mention)
• The Promise and Peril of Parallel Chat in Video Meetings for Work  (CHI2021 LBW)
  • Blog post: The rise of parallel chat in online meetings: how can we make the most of it? – Microsoft Research
• More coming soon…

Associated work

• MeetingCoach: An Intelligent Dashboard for Supporting Effective and Inclusive Meetings – Microsoft Research (CHI2021)

Guides

• A guide to having better remote meetings by being more intentional – Microsoft Research
• Suggestions for Parallel Chat in Meetings – Microsoft Research
• More coming soon…

Cite the study:

Sean Rintel, Abigail Sellen, Advait Sarkar, Priscilla Wong, Damian Borowiec, Nancy Baym, Rachel Bergmann. (2020). 2020 Study of Microsoft Employee Experiences in Remote Meetings During COVID-19. Microsoft Research. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/meeting-during-covid-19/