Over the past year, the average workday has gotten 48 minutes longer and we are in 13 percent more meetings, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, while 71 percent of meetings are considered unproductive and inefficient. Meeting burnout and meeting fatigue are real and are among the primary culprits for what Gallup called a decline in employee engagement last year as well as employee well-being concerns.

What even constitutes a meeting in the end? 

According to the U.S. Travel Association, formal meetings, events and incentives drive approximately 38 percent of business travel. That means casual business meetings comprise most of the rest, but the fact that we’re not traveling to those meetings now doesn’t mean they aren’t happening.  

Larger meetings and events either have been postponed or shifted to virtual experiences organized by professionals. When travel comes back, meetings professionals will still own and execute those events, as long as they are driving value to the business. 

Those more casual meetings that drive business relationships? Those are a different breed. On the whole, they’ve never been managed well, if at all managed. And, if conceivable, they are now managed even less optimally with responsibility even more decentralized. Thanks to the pandemic, you now have team leaders, managers, project leaders, third-party partner suppliers, even executives organizing their own daily hybrid, virtual meetings in completely new virtual environments. Yikes. 

Have they done this before? Do they have a clue about how to organize and run an online meeting that is totally dependent upon technology? Do they understand the logistics of putting together an agenda or sending out invitations that will get the critical people to attend? Are they able to achieve the meeting objectives? Do they even know what the objectives for the meeting are?

The answer is ‘no,’ and most companies aren’t offering training or support in how to optimize the meetings experience within the virtual platforms. And, like it or not, the pandemic has transformed daily meetings into the core of our workplace experience. Think about that—the meetings experience is now the workplace experience. What could that mean for the people tasked with managing travel and meetings? I think it could mean a lot, because meeting and travel managers already have the tools to correct it. 

Meetings Experience Now Equals Workplace Experience

Post-pandemic, we are all looking at a world whereby the C-suite is simply not going to believe in the need for travel at the same level they did before. So, this isn’t the time to think about RFPs and preferred rates. It’s time to think strategically about providing better meetings and using business intelligence in a way that can improve, optimize and report on the employee experience and meetings efficacy.

It’s also the time to think about new relationships with internal partners. 

Workplace and employee engagement generally falls under the purview of human resources. The pre-pandemic working relationship between the corporate travel department and HR was mostly centered around employee duty of care, safety and security and diversity and inclusion issues related to business travel and meetings programs, policies and preferred suppliers. Travel managers now should pivot that relationship to lean in and grab ownership of the online meeting experience. 

There are a few pioneering travel managers that are proactively stepping forward to help figure this out, and offering to own, manage and oversee this challenge which no doubt increases their internal value, profile, and job security. After all, travel managers have the experience and knowledge of how to manage challenges like this using best practices in policy creation, data collection, tech supplier sourcing, understanding internal business needs and purpose, supporting all of this in a virtual/hybrid world.

Travel managers should seek to partner more closely with HR and other executives to source the systems that make every meeting better for employees, especially the virtual/hybrid meeting technology that now is part of every employee’s everyday work life. The biggest problem that travel managers have always faced with meetings management has been getting adoption and visibility beyond their small group of administrators. By partnering with HR, the territory and recommended solution becomes significantly larger, as it impacts every employee, not just executive admins and administrators. Travel managers have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to positively impact the entire company beyond just cost savings. 

In summary, assisting employees with reducing bad meetings, optimizing meetings, improving employee virtual/hybrid meeting engagement and creating policies and an online meeting culture aligns to the most urgent priorities companies are facing in 2021 and beyond. Not only will this improve the employee experience and productivity, but it also will modernize your framework for business travel and daily meetings into the future. It is a unique opportunity for travel managers to grab a hold of and add to their existing scope of work to yet again demonstrate their value to the corporation.