With the rise of remote jobs and work-from-home setups, physical meetings are turned into virtual meetings. Virtual meetings are the only way to connect with your colleagues and clients to talk about your projects and any other agendas when you cannot conduct or attend a face-face meeting, and this can be done through a video conference, webinar, or call conference. To give you a better understanding of how virtual meeting works, let us present to you the top virtual meetings’ pros and cons.
5 pros of virtual meetings
Let’s start talking about the pros of virtual meetings that you need to consider.
More participants can access
For virtual meetings, you don’t need to worry too much about attendance. As long as your participants have a strong and stable internet connection, everyone can easily connect from wherever they are in the world as they do not need to travel or commute to attend.
Meetings can be recorded
Unlike physical meetings, you have the option to record everything in virtual meetings. If physical meetings require you to listen to the presenter in real-time, virtual meetings allow you to take screenshots of key information to save and use later whenever you have other important things to do.
Easier to leave
We know that listening for too long to topics that are not relevant to your project is quite annoying. One of the advantages of virtual meetings is that whenever there are non-relevant topics in your session, it is easier to make an excuse to leave the meeting with a lesser chance to feel awkward.
Save time and cost
Compared to physical meetings, virtual meetings don’t require hotel accommodation costs, arrangements of facilities, travel expenses, etc., a smart device with a stable internet connection is all it requires.
Productivity
Since virtual meetings give everyone to attend from their desks, it gives the participants the opportunity to be available for other tasks rather than out-of-office meetings, take place.
5 cons of virtual meetings
While there are benefits of attending/conducting a virtual meeting, they also have their drawbacks. These are a few of those:
Internet connection can fail
As mentioned above, a strong and stable internet connection is one of the things that a virtual meeting requires. However, there may be instances when a participant will be experiencing a poor signal. This can lead to a chance of not attaining a complete discussion and can miss a vital part of the session.
Low personal contact
Face-to-face communication is the best mean of communication. This allows you to pick up non-verbal cues and body language.
On a contrary, a virtual meeting has a chance of not giving us the opportunity to truly convey ourselves. It can also limit the depth of understanding you want to receive from the meetings and from people.
Time zone differences
When team members are in different time zones, it may be hard to conduct virtual meetings where everyone is comfortable with the time that you set. You may need to keep the schedule moving each week to make it fair for everyone.
Less lively
It’s hard to stay engaged and enthusiastic when we can’t feed off of the energy of in-person interactions. Virtual meetings can also be tiring. It’s hard to keep your eyes on the screen for hours listening to the speaker. Also, it is more difficult for all participants to take an active role in a virtual meeting, especially if the group is large, whereof in a face-to-face, you can easily create a reciprocal conversation.
Visual and audio only
Depending on your industry, virtual meetings don’t allow you to experience or try out personally the products or only prototypes presented to you by the speaker since you can only see them on the screen.
Takeaways
Virtual meetings are the new normal. It is simply a meeting that happens online rather than physically with all the participants in the same meeting room. Like everything, virtual meetings have their bad and good sides. As we tackle this topic, we hope that these virtual meetings’ pros and cons that we presented above give you an idea of whether when you will make virtual meetings an option or necessity.
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