Project duration: 2024 – expected end in 2027
Funding: Supported by the Dr. Theo + Friedl Schöller Foundation
Virtual meetings now account for a considerable share of many employees’ working time. They not only serve the exchange of information and the coordination of tasks, but also fulfill important social and organizational functions. Meetings enable employees to actively contribute, make decisions together, and develop an understanding of organizational processes and goals. At the same time, however, virtual meetings are often perceived as ineffective and exhausting. Especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of virtual meetings has increased significantly, bringing challenges such as fatigue more strongly into focus.
The aim of the research project is to develop a feedback intervention to improve virtual meetings based on the real-time assessment of meeting behavior and the immediate feedback of this information to participants. While previous approaches have mainly analyzed speaking time or speaker changes, this project additionally focuses on the functional quality of meeting contributions. Both functional and dysfunctional behaviors during meetings will be taken into account. Furthermore, the project investigates how the feedback intervention affects meeting satisfaction and communication behavior, as well as the extent to which automated methods can be used to analyze virtual meetings.