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An empirical study of the effectiveness of telepresence as a business meeting mode

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Abstract

Telepresence is a technology that has emerged as a promising mode for conducting business meetings with distributed participants, since it enables an immersive lifelike experience. However, telepresence meetings are substantially more expensive than audio- and video-conferencing meetings. This paper examines the justification of using telepresence for meetings. Based on an extensive literature review, two research questions about the effectiveness of telepresence for achieving meeting objectives are formulated. These are then addressed in an empirical study consisting of two phases, conducted in a large multinational corporation in which telepresence is widely used. In Phase 1, a list of meeting objectives is compiled. In Phase 2, the effectiveness of telepresence is analyzed relative to audio-conferencing, video-conferencing, and face-to-face for these objectives, based on input from 392 meeting organizers. The results of the analysis indicate that although the effectiveness of telepresence is higher than the effectiveness of audio- and video-conferencing for several meeting objectives, it is not significantly different from the effectiveness of face-to-face for any objective.

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Notes

  1. Research on Electronic Meeting Systems incorporates the notion of temporal dispersion in meetings and also considers asynchronous meeting support [24, 62, 87].

  2. Prior research does not provide a theoretical basis to classify these objectives.

  3. Notably, each successive meeting mode provides the communication functionality of the previous mode, with equal or better quality. For example, the quality of auditory cues transmission in audio- and video-conferencing is the same, on the other hand, the transmission of visual cues in telepresence is typically through higher quality video than in video-conferencing.

  4. In addition, as discussed below, responses were also sought from other attendees of a subset of the meetings, to analyze the effect of common method bias.

  5. Measuring the perceived effectiveness bears similarity with the construct of perceived usefulness, which is key in the TAM [20].

  6. Mean effectiveness scores across all meeting modes were between 3.55 and 4.65 on a scale of 1–5, suggesting that meeting organizers were familiar enough with the meeting modes to avoid poor meeting mode choices.

  7. This analysis is based on the aggregate averages, across the four meeting modes, because of the limited number of observations for some of the objectives.

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Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the support of Mr. Joost Drieman and Mr. Pol Vanbiervliet for this research project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Tweekerkenstraat 2, 9000, Ghent, Belgium

    Willem Standaert

  2. Vlerick Business School, Ghent, Belgium

    Steve Muylle

  3. Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    Steve Muylle

  4. Cox School of Business SMU, Dallas, TX, USA

    Amit Basu

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  1. Willem Standaert
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Correspondence to Willem Standaert.

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Standaert, W., Muylle, S. & Basu, A. An empirical study of the effectiveness of telepresence as a business meeting mode. Inf Technol Manag 17, 323–339 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10799-015-0221-9

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