E-Meeting

An e-meeting is a meeting between at least two people who can see each other but are not in the same place. An e-meeting is a web-based meeting or conference format that allows people to see and hear each other. They can hear each other through VoIP. VoIP stands for Voice Over Internet Protocol. Participants talk in real time and may even make presentations with visual aids such as charts and graphs.

The term e-meeting stands for ‘electronic meeting.’ We also call it an online meeting or virtual meeting. A virtual meeting, however, may also refer to a meeting with an artificial intelligence or fictitious character.

An electronic meeting system (EMS) is a type of computer software that facilitates creative problem solving and decision-making of groups within or across organizations. The term was coined by Alan R. Dennis et al. in 1988. The term is synonymous with group support systems (GSS) and essentially synonymous with group decision support systems (GDSS). Electronic meeting systems form a class of applications for computer supported cooperative work.

Mainly through (optional) anonymization and parallelization of input, electronic meeting systems overcome many deleterious and inhibitive features of group work.

Similar to a web conference, a host invites the participants to an electronic meeting via email. After logging into the session, meeting attendees participate primarily through their keyboards, typing responses to questions and prompts from the meeting host.

Electronic meeting systems have been designed to enhance group effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. Face-to-face groups can suffer from a number of process losses including:

• Domination of the conversation by one or more members
• Individuals withholding comments for fear of criticism or negative evaluation
• Members failing to participate because they perceive that their input is not required
• Pressure to conform with senior members of the group

Consequently, the advantages of EMS supported meetings vs traditional face-to-face meetings and workshops are:

• Increased openness and less personal prejudice through anonymity
• Any-place (online) capability which avoids travel time and cost
• Increased participant availability (any place, any time).
• Increased interactivity and participation by parallelization
• More sophisticated analysis by voting and analysis in real time
• Less effort in preparation by using meeting templates
• Repeatable meeting and workshop process through meeting templates
• Automatic, comprehensive, neutral documentation

Importance

Recorded meetings. There’s something inherently repetitive about the old boardroom meeting. It’s like, “Didn’t we just discuss that last week? Why are we talking about it again?” Fortunately, online meetings right that wrong by providing the easy option to record each conference, thereby ensuring that any potential overlap from week to week can be mitigated via a simple review of the last recorded meeting.

Time saved. When a company decides to conduct a physical meeting, time needs to be spent booking a conference room, planning for the event itself, and then waiting on the inevitable late-comers who will delay the start of the meeting. But online meetings eliminate these time-wasting moments by offering easy-to-use Web conferencing that workers can access from the comfort of their desk. This remote access also allows people who aren’t physically in the office to participate in meetings, as business.com points out.

Forward thinking. With the broad availability of cloud solutions, organizations are increasingly occupying the virtual realm. For this reason, the adoption of online meetings is only in keeping with a wider business move toward a virtual infrastructure.

Overall productivity boosts. For businesses that have work-from-home policies, the availability of online meetings promises significant productivity increases, as web-meetings points out. That’s because workers who are doing their job from home won’t have to drive into the office on meeting days, which means that the time they save driving is time that can go toward boosting enterprise productivity.