| dc.description.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. | |
