Almost half of the participants in telephone conferences have already sat in the toilet during a call.

A quarter play video games, 9 percent do sports, while the boss reports the latest sales figures.

These results from a survey by Intercall, a major teleconferencing provider, show one thing: people working from home are often distracted when attending a meeting.

Bastian Benrath

Editor in business.

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    Nadine Bad

    Editor in business, responsible for “Job and Opportunity”.

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      The temptation to work on other things during a call - you're sitting at the computer anyway - some may be better at resisting than others.

      The fact is that it seems impossible to be as concentrated in a meeting remotely as in the conference room.

      The end of the mandatory home office required by law in the wake of the corona pandemic on June 30th could therefore be seen as a reason to be happy.

      When all employees are back to work in the office, meetings take place again physically and everyone is focused, so the thought.

      There is only one catch: Hardly any company will return to 100 percent office work.

      The reason is simple.

      There are many employees who don't want that.

      This was shown involuntarily by the technology group Apple, which - in comparison to pre-pandemic times - still generous home office regulation promptly reaped protests from its employees.

      The stumbling block was the announcement by management that their employees were expected to be in the office for at least three days a week from September onwards.

      "More is gained with flexibility and freedom than with blanket rules and specifications."

      The market research company Gartner estimates that by the end of next year, 47 percent of all knowledge workers in the world will be working from home. In many places, a change mode between office and home office could also establish itself, according to several other forecasts. "In addition to the industry, the size of the company is decisive for what meetings in the hybrid working world will look like in the future," says Inga Dransfeld-Haase, HR manager at the oil company BP and president of the Federal Association of Personal Managers (BPM). In large companies, the units often made their own decisions about how to get together and talk to each other. "It can be handled differently in the same house," believes Dransfeld-Haase with a view to the future.In smaller organizations, this is likely to result in fixed days of attendance much more often. "But more is gained with flexibility and freedom than with blanket rules and specifications."

      So there is some evidence that even after the acute pandemic has ended, it will remain the rule not to always have all participants in a meeting in the same place. Experts then call such a situation a “hybrid” meeting - eA part will be sitting at the table, part at home or elsewhere. Many HR managers have made training courses for virtual leadership and hybrid meetings a top priority, says Dransfeld-Haase: “If a meeting takes place hybrid, then it has to be inclusive. No employee is allowed to fall behind with his concern because he is virtually there. "

      Technology companies are therefore tinkering with solutions to improve such meeting situations, which are inevitably difficult in view of the distractions mentioned above. “First of all, the question has to be: How do I bring hybrid participants together?” Says Christian Vogt, Head of “Workplace Transformation” at the German branch of the Cisco telecommunications solutions company. Because a video conference, as it is mostly used today, is only suitable to a limited extent for hybrid meetings: there will always be more communication between the participants who are directly on site than with those who are connected. "The goal is: there shouldn't be second-class participants," says Vogt.