Change in meeting culture over time as a consequence of Covid-19

Abstract

During the years 2019-2022 the Covid-19 pandemic affected and shifted the day-to-day of the world on a global scale. Nationwide lockdowns forced businesses to change their meeting culture internally and externally, to accommodate new restrictions set in place by the government to reduce the spread of the virus. In this research paper, we are exploring the research question: How did the meeting culture change as a result of Covid-19, and are the changes temporary or permanent? To answer this question we have gathered daily search volume data from Google Trends, globally and nation specific of three major virtual platforms: Teams, Skype and Zoom. As well as supplemented the analysis with two semiconstructed interviews with participants from widely differing businesses and their subjective perception of the meeting culture. Through Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) analysis of Italy with Covid-19-related lockdown as a treatment, we find that search interest in virtual meeting platforms drastically increased after the lockdown. To further solidify our conclusion, we replicated our analysis in the year previous to the introduction of Covid-19, and found no change in search interest of virtual meeting platforms after the placebo lockdown date. RDD analysis was conducted for several countries (Australia, Italy, Sweden, and the UK) with both lockdown and reopening as a treatment. On average, we find that interest in virtual meeting platforms drastically increased after the introduction of a lockdown, and modestly decreased after the lockdown ended. When investigating how search interest in virtual meeting platforms evolves over time, we find that it gradually decreases over the duration of the lockdown but does not return to initial pre-lockdown levels. The supplemented interviews supported the main findings of this paper and gave insight into a larger adaptation of virtual meetings, with a remaining emphasis on physical meetings as a necessity to build relations. Additionally; the financial, social, and environmental consequences of the change in meeting culture were discussed. The implications of this paper suggest that businesses would benefit from having a more open mind and acceptance towards change and new technologies.