Among the many long-lasting impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the sudden mass adoption of social distancing created a situation that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. Millions of knowledge workers discovered they no longer need to travel into an office on a daily basis – or even at all. This sudden and massive shift in the “where” of work has already resulted in considerable experimentation and debate among firms, affected real-estate values and cities, inspired numerous new technology ideas, and even given rise to a named syndrome that, while perhaps not medically recognized, is immediately recognizable: “Zoom Fatigue”. These changes pose serious questions with respect to both individual and organizational resilience: If this is the future of work, is it sustainable? What will its long-term effects be on workers and their firms?

We hope to contribute to a richer understanding of this phenomenon by providing an account of the aspirations and concerns of some of these workers themselves. This paper describes research on workers’ experience of remote meetings via the mediation of PC technologies, smart phones, and videoconferencing software during COVID. As we will discuss, most research on remote meetings has focused on practical issues, emphasizing productivity, while leaving relatively unexplored the fact that meetings are also social events, sometimes intensely so. Our research suggests that, for workers, the social dimension of meetings is actually the more consequential consideration. The introduction and continued use of technology may pose greater challenges to our social resilience than to productivity.

Our research approach

In the spring of 2020, shortly after most of the world adopted strict pandemic response measures, we began a process of interviewing individuals from a wide diversity of professions, industries and geographies, to understand their experience transitioning to remote work. Notably, these interviews were all conducted remotely, as was all of our team’s collaboration on this project. This presented us with an opportunity for auto-ethnography that also helped inform this work.

Our research involved three distinct phases, which provided us with a progressively richer understanding of remote collaboration. In Phase I, we conducted roughly three dozen interviews, during which we documented a wide variety of stories about diverse, often creative uses of remote collaboration technologies. Some were decidedly not about work – a baby shower featuring pre-arranged delivery of gifts and goodies, a large and raucous family gathering that joined multiple households on two continents, or “game nights” involving the clever use of multiple game boards. Nonetheless the majority of events participants described for us were business meetings.² As a way of coping with the pandemic and enforced social distancing, most of our participants had positive things to say about technology use, reflecting what appears to be a surprising consensus: remote work actually works! (Barrero et al, 2021; Parker et al, 2022) This is not to say it’s without its challenges. Newer employees lacking organizational network ties struggle with career advancement (Barrero et al, 2021); many workers – but especially mothers – report longer work hours and corroding work-life boundaries. This includes a sense of being overwhelmed by meetings (ibid). Many of these challenges, not surprisingly, implicate technology and point to opportunities for improvement. Over the course of our Phase I interviews we thus paid special attention to technology-related complaints, ultimately compiling these into a list of roughly 75 items that we organized in terms of audio, visual or general technical issues.

We made use of this list in Phase II of our research. These interviews, conducted in the Fall of 2020, focused explicitly on discussions of remote work-related meetings, using a retrospective approach. First, we asked participants (n=24) to provide us with a catalogue of their recent meetings. Then we asked them to comment on whether they’d experienced any of our list of technology breakdowns in these meetings. We also asked them to comment on how serious any given breakdown was, using a five point scale, with a score of 1 representing no serious consequences, while a score of 5 is the most serious. The result of this exercise was a matrix containing thousands of cells, documenting the seriousness of our breakdowns across dozens of meetings. This scoring method helped us recognize patterns in the ways different technology breakdowns have on different types of meetings. Just as importantly, it provided us with an occasion for gathering stories about what made some breakdowns “serious.” These stories, it turns out, drove the primary insights of this paper.

Before turning to that discussion, we provide a brief description of Phase III to round out this introduction to research methods. After Phase II we engaged in a series of structured brainstorm sessions with members of our larger organization – primarily engineers involved in machine learning algorithms research. These brainstorms resulted in a set of application or usage concepts, which became the focus of Phase III interviews, wherein we tested these concepts with research participants (n=17) to have them rate and comment. Analogously to our Phase II interviews, the feedback ratings we received from participants were useful, but far more valuable were the associated discussions, which helped us understand participants’ attitudes regarding the potential for AI in facilitating remote meetings.

MEETINGS AS RITUALS

The breakdowns we documented and discussed in Phases I and II of our research point to a seemingly straightforward, foundational insight about meetings: in addition to their more explicit practical or instrumental purpose, meetings also have a social dimension, which plays a significant role in how attendees experience them. This was clear in our Phase II problem-ranking data. In a majority of cases where participants ranked problems as either “serious” or “very serious”, their reasons involved a negative social outcome. Negative social outcomes were sometimes described at a personal level, for instance perceived damage to one’s professional reputation or identity, or potential damage to one’s relationship with colleagues. In other cases, negative social outcomes were described at more of a group level – for instance, loss of cohesion or a general sense of awkwardness among teams. In both cases, we distinguished such outcomes from what might be considered “practical” outcomes, including lost productivity, a disrupted meeting agenda, or other outcomes associated with work productivity.

The prevalence of the social dimension came as a mild surprise; there is little in the technological literature on remote meetings that would seem to predict this. The field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), for instance, has focused squarely on remote collaboration for decades, with an enduring attention on making meetings more effective (Yankelovich et al, 2004) by focusing on such practical concerns as meeting preparation (e.g., Bicharra Garcia, et al, 2004), facilitation (Hughes and Roy, 2004), note-taking (Exposito et al, 2017), information summarization (Shang, et al, 2018), or information visualization [Shi et al, 2017]. Indeed, despite the fact that the CSCW community has explicitly embraced the use of ethnographic methods (Schmidt and Bannon, 2013), there has been an equally explicit tendency to focus ethnographic methods on how people “get things done” (Blomberg and Karasti, 2013; Randall et al, 2021). This is especially true of ethnomethodologically inspired ethnographies, which have achieved relative prominence in CSCW, and which focus on practical accomplishments as a kind of remedy to older social scientific studies of work that “actually miss out how it is done: they miss the ‘doing’, of work, how work activities are achieved in the actions and interactions of those doing the work” [Button, 2012: 678].

Thus, despite much attention in CSCW to the social production of work in the context of meetings, there is little regard for the work of social production. Indeed, as (Niemantsverdriet and Erickson, 2017) lament, technology-focused research “…seems driven by a view of meetings as an uncomplicated venue where people simply work together to pursue collective goals like solving problems, designing artifacts, and making decisions.” To counter this, and understand the anxieties that technologies can produce, we propose a perspective that views meetings as rituals. We use the term intentionally and carefully, aware of both the deep history of research on ritual in anthropology, and the many pitfalls such work has presented: an overemphasis on the distinction between instrumental and symbolic action; the bracketing of rituals as entirely distinct from other human endeavors – or conversely, the suggestion that all human behavior is infused with ritualism. By calling out the ritual dimension of meetings we hope to draw attention to two aspects:

First, as many anthropologists have noted, rituals are sites for the (re)production of social order. Within the tradition of symbolic anthropology, Turner (1969) rescued the concept of ritual from its association with vestigial cultural conservatism to show its functioning in broader social and cultural processes. Geertz (1973:96) famously notes that rituals provide both “models of” and “models for” the functioning of a natural order, to produce an alignment between beliefs and dispositions. Bell (1992:85) describes this process as “redemptive hegemony.” “To maintain and adapt their assumptions about the order of reality persons and groups engage in degrees of self-censorship or misrecognition, as well as legitimation and objectification in the guise of more stable social structures.”

Not surprisingly we find an abundance of rituals in modern corporations, whose reliance on the careful alignment of functional constituents and components is perhaps unsurpassed among all forms of social organization, and whose embrace of the notion of “culture” has been absolute. “Culture has been the fertile soil that has enabled both their purpose and their strategy to come to life and drive extraordinary performance at scale.” (Joly, 2022). Onboarding events, mandatory trainings, and performance reviews are a few obvious examples that come to mind, but so are meetings. While they may seem to represent the epitome of mundanity, or even drudgery, meetings are sites where the (re)production of corporate culture and social ordering is enacted, and occasionally challenged. A few anthropologists of meetings working outside the technology industry have demonstrated this understanding. Schwarzman (1989), among the first and most extensive anthropological treatments of meetings, emphasizes the extent to which they “generate the appearance that reason and logical processes are guiding discussions and decisions, whereas they facilitate …relationship negotiations, struggle, and commentary” (1989:24). Sandler and Thedvall (2017:15) similarly point out that meetings are “makers, making willing revolutionaries and endlessly improvement-oriented workers and rule-internalizing bureaucrats.”

A second aspect of our interest in meetings-as-rituals is the way in which they both manage and produce risk. At a fundamental level, commitment to any form of joint action may include risks, as Jones et al (2015) point out and demonstrate in the context of team formation meetings at hackathon events, which are self-consciously styled to mimic the world of tech startups, “an economy of fast-paced, free-market, high-concept innovation cycles presupposes a mobile, flexible, technically adroit, and calculatingly self-interested workforce—who, for all their potential gains, may still pay a high human toll.” (341). The hackathon setting, though “artificial” in some respects, nonetheless casts high relief on both risks of commitment to joint action (exploitation, loss of autonomy, or entanglement in problematic endeavors) and how those risks are managed through complex displays of interest, hesitancy, reassurance or commitment.

We may not all attend hackathons or work for technology startups, but meetings can still feel risky and produce anxieties, as anyone who has felt the pressure of a client pitch, a challenging internal deliberation, or a gaffe in front of a large group of unfamiliar colleagues knows all too well. This anxiety is partly a result of the fact that meetings, like other rituals, are settings where attention to performance itself is heightened. A number of studies, mostly by ethnographers of communication (e.g., Hyme, 1964; Baurman, 1975; Irvine, 1979), have documented how communicative practice marks a setting as “special”, thus calling sharper attention to itself. Bell (1992) calls this process “ritualization”: “a way of acting that specifically establishes a privileged contrast, differentiating itself as more important or more powerful,” than similar actions in other more mundane settings. Heightening attention to performance and imbuing the event with power raises the social stakes. Meetings are where workers explicitly perform hierarchy, transparency and trust, relationships to colleagues, and perhaps most fundamentally their identities as professionals “…capable of ‘making themselves,’ a proposition that remains cherished across the liberal political spectrum today” (Boyer, 2013: 406). This is true not just for the most obvious speeches or presentations, but on all kinds of actions. The performance or signaling of attention, as we discuss below, may be as consequential and fraught as the performance of a speech.

A number of resources are mobilized in service of ritualization, including the choice of setting, the inclusion or exclusion of particular participants, the arrangement of bodies, the allocation of turns at talk and, of course, the use of language and nonverbal communication, take on significance to the extent that they both call attention to themselves and imbue the event with greater power. Remote meeting technologies may interact with these other resources in complex ways, for instance by introducing unfamiliarity, instability, or shaping the types of verbal or nonverbal behaviors that are available to attendees. Fair or not, a worker’s performance and status within an organization may hinge on the functioning of a technology that is out of one’s control. As Saatçi et al (2020), demonstrate, even a momentary loss of network connectivity can result in a remote employee being first teased, then admonished, and finally excluded from an interaction, despite an ostensive organizational interest in inclusiveness. Our own participants were clearly aware of such risks as they rated and then discussed the relative seriousness of various technology issues. The most highly-rated (i.e., most serious) technology problem on our list, for instance, was inexplicable silence, primarily because of the anxiety it produces:

“I’m giving a presentation and all of a sudden I can’t tell if anybody is even listening. It’s the most horrible feeling. Have I lost them? Are they upset? Is the network down?” (P2-7)

Even when functioning as designed, technologies can introduce social risks. Our participants’ stories included instantly recognizable episodes such as embarrassment over home environments caught in the video background, or audio inadvertently shared because someone forgot to mute their microphone:

“My background is pretty good – it has a nice painting in it, so I like to leave it on. But you can also see part of my kitchen in the corner, and sometimes my son walks through with his shirt off after he gets out of the shower. He’s seventeen so it looks like I’ve got a half-naked man walking around behind me. It’s disturbing.” (P2-10)

“My biggest fear is people hearing me eating while I’m on a call…” (P1-24)

These stories are instantly relatable and funny to many of us, and yet they also show how carefully we must manage our professional identities in the era of digital liberalism. Bookshelves in the background are acceptable, messy kitchens are not – or more correctly, messy kitchens may not be acceptable for certain types of meetings, involving certain types of participants. This contextually dependent sense of propriety is partly what draws our attention to the ritualistic aspect of meetings, not unlike different norms for self-presentation for going to a picnic versus going to church.

Oversharing, as mentioned, can affect more than individual identities – it can harm relationships, as some of our participants recognized. Unfamiliarity with technology, or carelessness in the use of it, can have devastating consequences for professional relationships:

“Once I was in a meeting and someone IM’ed a nasty comment about the speaker to the person who happened to be sharing their screen [with all meeting participants] at the time. It was awful. You have to be super careful about stuff like that.” (P2-1)

While malfunctions and oversharing provide dramatic examples, many recognized more subtle social effects of technological mediation. Even in more mundane, internal meetings, the use of videoconferencing could degrade one’s experience of meetings, particularly for individuals who may already feel somewhat disadvantaged.

The thing we are missing is having a social and emotional connection with colleagues, since the remote meetings started. People don’t put their cameras on, so we can’t see them. It becomes slightly tough to make connections. When I don’t have that connection it makes it harder for me to speak confidently, especially in the larger review meetings (P2-6)

In our weekly staff meeting, it’s much more subdued than it used to be. People wait for longer – they have their microphones muted. It creates a delay so people aren’t jumping over each other. People wait – they don’t add much. It’s a particular dynamic with the participants. It’s an energy change I’ve noticed. People are not only dealing with a whole change to their teaching strategies and teaching world. There’s an uncertainty that they’re doing it right. People are a little more timid, so they don’t interject. It’s a different dynamic (P2-2)

Here the interaction of technology and ritualization can be seen through the lens of a negative example. Hesitancy and timidity due to unfamiliarity with colleagues can be further exacerbated by awkwardness created by latency between speaker turns that comes from the need to unmute microphones, leading to a downward spiral of participation. Not only is the social dimension of the meeting undermined, but its productivity as well.