Since the pandemic kicked off, the majority of meetings have taken place online instead of in-person. While some believe the trend is going to die down once the pandemic subsides, Gartner begs to differ.
A recent report from the analyst firm says the shift away from in-person meetings is actually expected to continue. By 2024, Gartner predicts the proportion of enterprise meetings held in-person will go fall from 60 percent to 25.
Today, almost 80 percent of workers use collaboration tools for work, up from roughly 50 percent two years ago. The 44 percent increase in the past 24 months came as the result of the pandemic and the shift to remote working.
“Collaboration tools found renewed importance during Covid-19 for their role in ensuring the productivity of suddenly remote teams,” said Christopher Trueman, Principal Research Analyst at Gartner.
“As many organizations shift to a long-term hybrid workforce model, cloud-based, personal and team productivity technologies, along with collaboration tools, will form the core of a series of new work hubs that meet the requirements of various remote and hybrid workers.”
Collaboration tools aside, businesses have also increased their usage of storage and sharing services (by 74 percent), as well as real-time mobile messaging platforms (by 80 percent).
Trueman believes that cloud-based meeting solutions and content service platforms can ensure equitable collaboration, tools and resource access for all participants in a meeting, regardless of location.
Gartner polled 10,080 full-time employees at organizations with 100 or more employees for the report.
