In a world where online meeting technology is widely used, why are face to face meetings still relevant to business? 

During the pandemic, online meetings became a lifeline. We used them for all types of business meetings, and we even used them socially. The pandemic forced us to accept and embrace virtual meeting technology in a way that we could not have imagined. During the various lockdowns, we tried and tested virtual meetings in every conceivable scenario (including the work Christmas Party!)  This extensive usage has enabled us to form objective view about the value of face-to-face meetings compared with online meeting.

So, in a world driven by technology, why do companies choose to invest in face to face meetings?

• What are the key advantages of in-person meetings?
• When should you meet face to face?
• What types of meetings are more effective when they are conducted face to face vs remote meetings?
• And how can your clients and your team benefit from meeting each other in the real world?

We all thrive on human interaction. So, it is no surprise that meeting clients and colleagues face to face helps all of us to make deeper connections, build trust and create strong business relationships.

Taking the time to arrange to meet someone face to face shows that you value the person and demonstrates that you are invested in the meeting agenda.  

It is more difficult to build business relations ships via online meetings. Digital meetings tend to be rigid and don’t often deviate from the agenda. When the agenda is complete the meeting ends and everyone leaves. This type of meeting doesn’t encourage small talk or networking and that can make it hard to build effective relationships.

When you meet someone in the real world, conversations are very different. They include more small talk.  It is the unplanned, incidental conversations over a cup of coffee that help us to make connections, find shared interests and ultimately build lasting business associations.

One of the biggest problems with online meetings are the technical gremlins who always strike at the worst possible moment.

Technical problems like a poor internet connection, poor sound quality, or camera problems make it difficult to communicate effectively. This can have a detrimental impact upon the effectiveness of your meeting. It wastes time and is both frustrating and stressful.

By meeting face to face, you remove the possibility of any technical problems, and therefore many companies are choosing to hold important, or sensitive meetings face to face.

Karen Kirby from greenshoot HR told me of the consequences she encountered within an HR meeting.

“Technical issues can be problematic. I had a case recently where we had to conduct a call via zoom. It was between a member of staff, an employer, a union representative and myself as the HR advisor. The employee who had arranged the meeting had a poor internet connection, and her screen froze at important points in time. This was frustrating for everyone and meant that an important discussion couldn’t flow properly. The employee was raising an issue. The technology made it difficult for her to get her point across and increase everyone’s understanding of her perspective.”

Collaboration and creativity are all about sharing and developing ideas. If you are in the same room this process flows naturally. You can chat, explore, even sketch out ideas. You can see other people’s response to an idea, and you can also gauge when they are not so keen on an idea. Compare this to a virtual meeting where you spend your time apologising for talking over someone. Virtual meetings tend to dampen down the creative process making it clunky and difficult.

When you are bouncing ideas around, there is more opportunity to chit chat, and this can bring unexpected ideas to the fore. This can be particularly useful within marketing and sales.

Face to face collaborative meetings are essential within certain industries. Imagine trying to finalise a sales brochure. You need to pick the paper quality, weight, print finish and check that the colours are ‘true’. Trying to achieve this online is a slow and arduous process which often results in delays, with samples having to be posted out to clients. Face-to-face streamlines the process and make decision making quicker and easier. 

We discuss this in more detail within our case study with Victoria Prince from touchpoints marketing which you will find later on in this article.

From time to time, we all need to resolve issues with other people. Sometimes this can be as simple as clearing up a misunderstanding, but on occasions, it can be more serious.

When you need to resolve a dispute, it is often important to be able to communicate compassion and understanding for the other person. This helps to establish empathy and can help to de escalate a problem.

One of the teams that I interviewed always include a 10-minute opportunity for everyone within the team to share gripes and complaints. By sharing minor complaints in this way, the team and the management can listen and take action to prevent a minor issue from becoming deep seated dissatisfaction. This only works in face-to-face meetings when you can read each other’s body language. Trying to do the same thing online can escalate an issue.

In the interviews that I conducted, several participants highlighted the benefits of traveling to and from a meeting.

When you travel to the meeting, you can use the journey to think through the agenda and start to focus on the topic of the meeting all of which helps you to prepare for the meeting.

And at the end of the meeting, the journey home is a time to reflect and digest.

Victoria from Touchpoints Marketing chatted about this when I interviewed her. You can read the full case study below.

Victoria is a Marketing Expert, multi award-winning businesswoman and Entrepreneur who took her healthy snacking business from a ‘concept’ to 4 product listings with Selfridges in less than a year.

Dragon’s Den also called her asking her to apply – for 2 seasons in a row. She gracefully declined!

She set up her consultancy ‘Touchpoints Marketing’ in 2016. It’s now a team of 6 and they work with ambitious start-up & scale-up businesses to develop clear marketing strategies to meet their big ‘audacious’ goals.

When it comes to assessing the value of face to face meetings, Victoria has a unique perspective. Her work includes working with individual clients to develop marketing strategies on a 1-to-1 basis. She also works with groups of clients, teaching them how to create their own marketing strategy. The two approaches require different skills. The first is a consultative approach and the second requires skills as a trainer and educator.

“Meeting with clients face-to-face helps to build trust. You get to know them, you make a deeper connection and as a result, they have faith that you will deliver their project successfully.

When you meet a client in person, you get to understand what they really mean and need where as with online, a lot of body language is lost and that makes it harder to gauge a client’s response to an idea.

When you meet face to face there are lots of incidental conversation. The chit chat and small talk often gives you an insight into the client’s personal life or beliefs and that can spark an idea that you can use within your marketing strategy.

Marketing and design are very visual, so there are certain parts of the process that are so much simpler face to face – and significantly harder and slower online.

Take something as simple as a brochure. It is made of card, perhaps with some inserts, and some spot varnishing. It is visual and tactile.  The feel of the paper is as important as what it looks like. Face to face, the client can see, feel, and interact with the materials that we suggest. They can see the colours, foils etc and touch them – if we tried to do something like that online, we would have to post samples to the clients and that just makes the process longer and more disjointed.

With creative concepts it is much easier to show than to tell –

Our job involves imagination, creating concepts and we must show clients how a particular concept could work for them. Being able to show them visual cues is so much easier – it helps us to fill the gaps for clients. It is very difficult to do that online.

What’s more, when you are face to face, you can see your clients body language and response, and that can tell you a lot about whether they like an idea or even understand the idea – face to face you can read their body language and if necessary, fill in the gaps for them.“

I asked Victoria how she got on during the pandemic when all of the meetings were on Zoom or Teams.

“During the pandemic we all suffered from online-meeting fatigue. We had back-to-back Zoom calls. On one occasion,  I had a Zoom call with a client in Hong Kong, the next call was the middle east, the next call was England and the next call was America…In one way, it was great because it would have been impossible to do all of that in a day, but the other side of the coin was the fact that you felt ‘run ragged’. The time to prepare, before and then reflect afterwards disappeared. So, although you could fit more into a day, it was difficult to then find the time that you needed between the meetings.

When you drive somewhere, you mentally prepare for a meeting during the journey. It’s quite meditative. You start to focus long before you arrive, and then the drive home is really useful because you think through the meeting and you often get ideas and sometimes get a light-bulb moment that is a better solution for the client – so that reflection time is a valuable part of the creative process.”

Victoria also attends network meetings so our discussion moved to online and in person networking.

“Face to face networking is great. It helps build deeper connections. When you meet online, it is so much harder to get to know someone.

I met with someone recently who I’d met at an online networking event, and I was worried that I wouldn’t recognise her in person and she said exactly the same.

When you meet 1-2-1, the real-life environment will trigger a story. And it is often these stories that help us to find shared experiences and make connections.

When you are in a real-life situation you can also see how people react and interact with others and that can tell you a lot about them – simple things like how they treat a waiter or waitress gives you a strong indication of the type of person they are. It helps me to decide if we would be able to work well together. “

Karen provides HR support, advice, and training to small businesses. She is a member of the chartered institute of personnel and development.  

I asked Karen “What kinds of HR meetings are more effective when they are face to face, and what role do virtual meetings play in your business?”

Karen said “I’ve worked from home for a long time and prior to the pandemic I spoke to clients face to face or over the phone. Zoom and Teams added a third dimensions. So, some conversations that would have taken place over the phone moved to zoom and this was an advantage.”

“During the various lockdowns we still had to conduct the full range of HR meetings.

These included first and second stage recruitment interviews, disciplinaries, return to work interviews, HR planning and strategy meetings. These all had to take place virtually.

And having experienced both types of meetings, I would always choose to meet face to face.”

I was interested to know why.

“Any meeting where body language is important is better conducted face to face.”

“ One of the biggest issues with online meetings is distraction. It’s so easy for someone to ask a question…you then search for a document that answers that question and it means that you are not fully listening to what someone is saying. When you meet face to face you can give 100% concentration to someone.“

“Any formal proceedings like redundancies, or disciplinaries or even positive meetings like second stage interviews are better face to face. It means everyone is giving 100% of their concentration.”

“Technical issues can be problematic. I had a case recently where we had to conduct a call via Zoom. It was between a member of staff, an employer, a union representative and myself as the HR advisor. The employee who had arranged the meeting had a poor internet connection, and her screen froze at important points in time. This was frustrating for everyone and meant that an important discussion couldn’t flow properly. The employee was raising an issue. The technology made it difficult for her to get her point across and increase everyone’s understanding of her perspective.”

“To summarise, face to face is important for any HR meeting that involves reading peoples body language, and any meeting that requires 100% concentration.

Virtual meetings are absolutely fine for non-contentions issues – things like a general discussion about HR policy or checking details within a contract.”  

Peter Gregory is a business relationship coach and a Mindsonar ®  professional. He uses coaching techniques and psychometric tools to quickly get to the heart of his clients thinking, identifying strengths and limiting blind spots, helping clients to open up new possibilities for success.

“I have a background in IT and I’ve always found online meetings useful.

However, when I am coaching, I like to meet clients face to face. The reason is simple. Your body telegraphs emotions, so as a coach, being able to read and interpret emotions expressed through body language is a useful tool.

When you meet face to face it is easier as a coach to detect changes in body language.

When people are uncomfortable, they fold their arms and shut down their body, hunch their shoulders, lean away, jiggle their legs and that gives you clues to how they are feeling. It can sometimes indicate that the conversation is moving into uncomfortable territory and as business coaching isn’t therapy, that can be your cue to pull back.”

“When you meet people online, You can still read body language but it is more demanding.  You have to work harder to pick up the cues. You tend to rely on facial expression, eyes and positioning in relation to the screen. If someone leans forward towards the screen, it can indicated that they are excited about an idea. When someone becomes still, or doesn’t look at the camera it can indicate that they have disengaged with the topic.

There are other advantages to face-to-face coaching session. When I meet clients face to face, it is often in a neutral space, like a meeting room. Being in a neutral space can help clients to feel comfortable and this encourages them to be more open, which in turn enables more effective and productive coaching because you get to the root of the issue quicker which means that you can start working to address the issue sooner.

Meeting face to face can be an advantage for my clients.

Coaching sessions tend to be more effective.

The person being coached often feels more relaxed and more connected.

Business coaches aren’t therapists, but when you are exploring psychometric profiles and looking at the things that drive us, emotions are always involved.

A large part of the work that I do is around making connections within business. We look at how to make the right connections that will lead to more business. Networking plays an important part within this strategy. And body language is important within this face to face context too.”

Richard manages a regional team of inspectors They hold team meetings every month, and they alternate between online meetings and face to face meetings.

I asked Richard about the benefits of face-to-face meetings. This subject happened to be on their agenda, so I was invited to join the team for 5 minutes to hear their thoughts first hand.

The team were strongly in favour of face-to-face meetings rather than online meetings. Their reasons included:

• Easier to communicate.
• You can catch up with other member of the team and you can have informal conversations.
• You can ask team members questions and get their view.
• Easier to share your point of view across.
• Less likely to be misunderstood.
• Easier to raise issues face-to-face.
• Easier to read body language.
• Much more interaction and engagement compared with online meetings.
• Eating together makes it easier to catch up over both work and social matters and that’s good for team morale.

Meeting face-to-face helps to build a strong team. When we meet face-to-face, it’s easier for me to communicate. The team look to me for direction and it’s so much easier to provide clear direction when we are face-to-face. The level of interaction and questioning is much higher if we are in the same room. Online meetings tend to have no interaction at all. It is harder to get an online team meeting to flow.

Meeting face-to-face, shows the team that you are invested in them. You are willing to spare the time to arrange the meeting, travel there, deliver the agenda and provide them with an excellent lunch. All these things help to show the team that they are valued. A person who feels valued is always much more willing to go the extra mile when you need them to.

Effective team meetings always tend to cover both negative and positive areas. Meeting face-to-face, in a neutral venue gives the team a space in which they are comfortable to chat openly about any issues, challenges and problems.

When we meet in person it is always so much easier to motivate the team. It also helps them to make connections and respect each other on a professional basis but also personally.

As a remote team, one of the values of meeting in person is that it saves us money on postage. We often need to give out new items of kit or paperwork, so being able to have these items delivered to our meeting venue means that we don’t have to pay for any onwards postage.

Every year we must get certain pieces of kit checked and calibrated, so being able to arrange for kit testing to be done while we meet is also very cost effective.