The great return to face-to-face meetings may be a bit like watching Dorothy click her ruby-bedecked heels and wish to get back to Kansas. If you say it enough, it will be so.

That certainly is what seems to be going on in the meetings space in 2023, at least in North American markets. According to the recently released 2023 Global Meetings and Events Forecast from American Express Global Business Travel, 90 percent of meetings in North America are expected to have an in-person component in 2023 – and 62 percent of these are expected to be in-person only events.

“Our survey respondents are ‘very optimistic’ about the future,” wrote Gerardo Tejado, SVP global value development and general manager for meetings and events at American Express GBT. “Two-thirds expect that the number of in-person events will return to pre-pandemic levels within one to two years. In North America, where respondents reported the highest percentage of completely remote workforces, internal and small and simple meetings have already surpassed 2019 levels. This has been true within our meetings and events business. We have seen the number of meetings during certain months and locations exceed 2019 levels, and our clients’ small and simple meetings have increased by 25 percent.”

In the survey of 580 global event professionals from five continents and 23 countries, most respondents reported a focus on in-person meetings, although some 29 percent of meetings in North America and 33 percent of meetings in Europe are expected to be hybrid in 2023. In Asia-Pacific and Latin America those numbers skewed higher to nearly half.
And to the extent that in-person meetings are in a rush to return, those meetings will not come cheap. The report notes that internal and small meetings are predicted to see the greatest cost per attendee in the Asia/Pacific region – around $711 per attendee per day, as compared to $554 per attendee per day in North America and Europe, and $662 in Latin America.

Yet, as the world climbed in and out of pandemic panic mode and companies have adjusted to the permanently remote worker and the cost savings that hybrid meetings bring, the era of the virtual meeting may be here to stay.

Brave New World of Meetings
“I think that hybrid meetings are the new reality,” says Bob Frisch author and founding partner at Strategic Offsites Group in Boston. “We are seeing more meetings now where every effort is made to have all the people there in person. Attendees are told that if you can’t be there in person, the meeting will happen anyway. But so often it is just not possible to be there.”

Other businesses count the exposure that hybrid meetings allow and consider how that fact alone can make up for what is lost in sacrificing the face-to-face benefits. A barrier to entry is removed and an explosion of bolstering technology developed during the past two years smooths the way for a wide audience to at least be “in the room,” if not engaged.

According to Cvent, it is not unusual for virtual events to capture six to eight times the number of registrations compared to the equivalent in-person event. But while virtual engagement will never equate to in-person meetings, the advent of virtual attendance has proven itself to be a reliable way to reach and engage a large, diverse audience in a relatively cost-effective manner. The virtual opportunity has widened to include previously unreachable events. For organizations, this has meant opening the door to a brand new group of attendees.

Is that door now beginning to close again as we roar into 2023 ready to face off against the tyranny of Zoom, Teams and virtual meetings fatigue? The answer is ”not so fast,” according to Kevin Iwamoto, chief customer officer and head of enterprise at Bizly.

“Hybrid meetings changed as the country exited the lockdown phase of the pandemic. The shift resulted in a focus on in-person experience with a hybrid component versus a highly produced event experience. As this volume increased, coupled with a decrease in meeting team size, users shifted towards self-service tools to help plan and execute those smaller meetings,” Iwamoto explains.

“At Bizly, we make that experience as quick and pain-free as possible. New technology adoptions have helped to entrench the concept of hybrid meetings and have made the practice more acceptable for participants by helping non-professional organizers build engaging and valuable in-person events that integrate with a variety of hybrid tools. Virtual technologies are an enabler of inclusive meetings, allowing attendees to participate where they otherwise couldn’t.”

Are You Wearing Pants?
While hybrid meetings have come a long way from the ubiquitous Polycom speaker phone with its scratchy audio that forced all in-person staff to lean in closely in order to make out the remote speech, the technology to enable effective hybrid meetings is still emerging and proving itself. And even when the audio and visual are humming along, the meeting is fighting the factors of distraction, alienation and the general absence of collegial rapport.

A Logitech survey published in June that polled more than 1,000 white-collar employees in Singapore about hybrid work challenges and hybrid meeting habits revealed that the three most common non-meeting-related activities of participants during virtual meetings were replying to e-mail (68 percent), using social media (51 percent) and browsing the Internet (46 percent). Further, more than half the participants who joined a hybrid meeting felt that they had fewer opportunities to bond with their in-office peers. Over one third (39 percent) felt their input was less valued than colleagues who were present, and nearly as many (38 percent) felt somewhat alienated compared to in-person participants.

Enter the Avatar
Hybrid meetings may be here to stay, says Frisch, but they are really hard to do well. Remote participants miss the watercooler effect or the approving or disapproving look from a key colleague in bringing up points of discussion from afar.

He cites the whiteboard or the flipchart. The remote attendee cannot see the notes or the small stickies the group is affixing to these aids so they are not tracking how others in the group are thinking or what the input looks like. In the boardroom banter, perhaps something is said by the remote attendee, which could have been said differently or more effectively. In face-to-face instances, a boss can take that staff member aside and explain what went wrong and how to make it right. In a hybrid context, that sidebar is lost.

Frisch says that we’ve lost a “whole generation of executives who are not being mentored because we don’t have the art of the subtle tap. There is no dropping by the watercooler or passing in the hallway or lingering over the coffee machine. These subtle little interactions between formal meetings aren’t happening and the feedback people were getting in their development has stopped occurring. The junior staff do not even realize all the training they’re not getting now.”

Frisch suggest an “avatar” approach be integrated into smaller hybrid meetings – appointing a representative who would be the in-room eyes and ears for each remote participant. They could adjust cameras to make viewing easier, read the notes on the board and provide a rounder, wider and more equitable playing field for the virtual participants.

Corbin Ball, CEO of Corbin Ball & Co., a meeting planning, tradeshow and events technology consultancy group located in Bellingham, WA, sees hybrid meetings as a positive evolution, and a new way of business that has only begun to show what is possible.

“Event technology has advanced more in the past three years than in the past decade,” Ball notes. “There has been an unprecedented amount of innovation, funding and best practices learned – not only with virtual and hybrid events but also in analytics, AI, metrics and more. Meetings will never be the same as the pre-COVID days. There will be much more demand for digitization. Virtual events will have a larger piece of the event pie and this is already having an effect. Many more workers are remote. The days of the cross-country trip for a 4-hour business meeting will be greatly reduced.”

What has changed as well are the metrics and analytics for these events, Ball says. “One of the real strengths for virtual events is the capability to track the attendee journey. Every website click or mobile device touch is trackable. The metrics that can be generated are extensive. Also, new metrics have been developed for virtual: How much are attendees engaged? How long are they there? How many interactions?”

Ball adds, “As we come back to face-to-face events, event marketers will have similar expectations for better metrics. Also, there are significant advances being made in analytics. AI will have a huge impact in this area and event technology providers have greatly improved their metrics as well.”

To that end, although not around the corner, the coming of the metaverse meeting may not be far off. It could create another form of an equal playing field, and a certain comfort within the added anonymity the platform brings to all participants.

“There are some components of the metaverse that are already beginning to affect meetings – smart contracts, smart ticketing, NFTs to provide new opportunities for revenue generation, enhanced security, and creating unique, digital experiences for attendees,” says Ball. “There will be many applications for events including wayfinding through an exhibit/event venue, real-time language layering on additional information to signs/exhibit displays.”

PepsiCo has experimented with hosting a conference using Mytaverse technology, and included keynote speakers and an audience of 450 employees sitting in a virtual presentation space. But the technology is nascent, expensive and nowhere near a standard of adoption.

Back to Basics
Alisa de Gaspe Beaubien, CEO and COO of Groupize, a cloud-based re-imagined meeting and event management platform, believes face-to-face is here to stay, if only because producing hybrid events is proving to be costly and complicated. And that view does not even begin to take in the resources a metaverse meeting would require.

“I believe the industry has learned that hybrid meetings are expensive to deliver and require a different skill set than that possessed by traditional meeting planners, often requiring IT or dedicated tech resources to assist in delivery/execution,” says de Gaspe Beaubien. “Technology-enabled events could include a remote audience, but the experience is not on par with an in-person meeting – for attendees, speakers and sponsors. Simple logistical items such as time zones and browser compatibility have been hard to manage in some platforms and that has further increased the frustration of attendees and the lack of effectiveness of the event. Large conferences may continue to make some content available online – either live or recorded – and check the box of a hybrid meeting. But I believe the volume of virtual meetings in 2023 will be very low,” De Gaspe Beaubien, adds.

The Groupize CEO notes that in late 2021 and early 2022 there were plenty of speed bumps in executing in-person meetings. Later onsite meetings returned with a vengeance and that has continued. Third parties, TMC’s and hotel chains all have released statistics that project in-person meetings surpassing pre-pandemic levels in 2023. Groupize, too, is seeing a 79 percent increase in volume over pre-pandemic levels.

“Companies fully recognize the value of in-person meetings and it seems like every department and every customer has put an in-person meeting into their departmental budgets,” she adds. “Companies are investing in face-to-face meetings and we are seeing real estate budgets redeployed to meetings and travel. We expect 2023 to be the year of frequent, internal, in-person meetings.”