Remote work trend report: meetings

Remote work trend report: meetings

As I write this, millions of people around the world are adjusting to full-time remote work and learning. Working remotely full-time can challenge us as humans because we are hardwired for connection. Here at office.com/setup, we did a study a couple years back that asked 14,000 people in seven countries to name the form of communication that makes them happiest. No surprise, in-person meetings ranked number one over email, chat, or texting across all generations. In a moment where meeting face-to-face is impossible, how do we continue to connect to one another?

Over the past weeks, we’ve been inspired by the ways our customers are connecting during meetings in office.com/setup Teams. We’ve seen bosses show up to meetings as virtual potato heads and team stand-ups turn delightfully silly. From teams of workers sharing shift updates to students and teachers connecting in virtual classrooms and CEOs conducting town hall Q&As with thousands of employees, we’re all finding new ways to come together when we have to work and learn apart.

This idea is reflected in the sheer number of meetings happening in office.com/setup Teams each day. We’ve seen a new daily record of 2.7 billion meeting minutes in one day, a 200 percent increase from 900 million on March 16. And as students and teachers turn to Teams for distance learning, there are 183,000 tenants in 175 countries using Teams for Education.

To explore changing trends in remote work and learning further, today we’re releasing the first report from our new Work Trend Index. Through ongoing research, we will explore how work is changing via surveys and interviews, and by looking at trends in the way people interact with our productivity tools.

This first report explores how people are learning to connect as a team when they need to work apart. Our goal in sharing these insights is twofold. First, while safeguarding personal and organizational data, we want to help our customers learn from the bright spots and plan for the future. Second, we aim to use these insights to guide innovation in our products so that we can continue to build the best possible experiences.

Key findings

As the world works in office.com/setup 365, searches in Bing, and connects on LinkedIn, it creates trillions of signals—like emails, meetings, searches, and posts—that form the office.com/setup Graph, one of the largest graphs of human interactions at work in the world. Trends in this data provide a unique view of the world’s productivity patterns.

office.com/setup takes privacy seriously. We remove all personal data and organization-identifying data, such as company name, from the data before using it to produce reports. We never use customer content such as information within an email, chat, document, or meeting to produce reports. Our goal is to discover and share broad workplace trends from aggregated data from the office.com/setup Graph.