Virtual Meetings: How to Increase Communication Effectiveness

As the internet technology is developing rapidly, this affect people’s daily life and also corporate’s management system.
Technology has changed business with high speed connections, providing the ability to reach more customers, to serve more people worldwide, improve products and services quality, streamlining the business process, allowing the less use of human force in intensive high-risk work. In addition to the changes that technology has been creating in society, business has also been influenced, both in terms of organizational structures as in terms of professional relationships.
With the emergence of the pandemic caused by COVID-19, organizations had to adapt their strategies to this new reality, profoundly changing the communication paradigm of the 20th century.
The way companies communicate internally and the way markets had to adapt to the restrictions imposed, leaded to the emergence of new forms of business communication interaction.
According to this new reality, this thesis aims to study the effectiveness of communication in virtual business meetings, trying to understand the new forms and procedures that have been implemented in form to improve its efficiency. To test the hypothesis that face-to-face teams deliver stronger interpersonal communication than virtual teams, an online questionnaire was distributed to the working group in Macau that have been worked in the event management industry for more than five years. At the same time, we also apply a semi-structured interview to ten professionals that have been worked for more than five years in the event management area. The results seem to show that although virtual teams have adapted well to these changes, interpersonal communication continues to be the best form of communication, leading us to conclude that virtual meetings still do not seem to have the capacity to replace face-to-face meetings.