75% of hybrid meetings are suffering tech failures according to research from Jabra, highlighting what it says is the normalisation of technology failures.
Jabra’s research, The Cost of a Bad Meeting, found that three quarters of global hybrid meetings experience at least one tech failure, with each meeting losing an average of nearly 11 minutes due to technical issues.
The report found that, rather than logging tickets and looking to fix the issues, employees are adopting informal, time-intensive workarounds. When a meeting starts to break down, a third of workers (34%) resort to using a single laptop as the primary room microphone and speaker, whereas three in ten (31%) abandon video streams entirely to continue audio-only. One in five (21%) of workers say that they try moving the entire meeting to a different room mid-session.
Technical strains were found to scale directly with meeting room dimensions, as very large spaces lose 30% more time to technology failures than small rooms, with an average of 12 minutes and 39 seconds lost per session due to technical troubleshooting.
Similarly, mic problems were reported in 75% of very large rooms, as opposed to 64% of small rooms, while video problems affect 59% of small rooms compared to 67% of large rooms.
Beyond technical disruption, the majority (87%) of workers experience some level of meeting dread and two in five (42%) confess that they reach their energy limit within just two hours of back-to-back meetings.
Steen Marquard, regional president, Jabra, commented: “We’re seeing that meeting failure has become totally normalised. Issues are no longer treated as isolated IT tickets, but as an accepted burden on daily productivity.
“Organisations wouldn’t tolerate a building where the lights failed in three quarters of meetings, so why do we work around AV issues? When technology fails, it can delay decision-making, impact productivity and undermine the purpose of bringing people together in the first place. By addressing tech shortfalls, organisations can unlock greater value from every meeting and every technology investment.”