People who have been working from home since March have spent, on average, nine days talking to colleagues and clients via video calls.
At the start of 2020, vast numbers switched their office desks for remote working. By March, Zoom was hosting 200 million daily meeting participants. By April, that number had risen to 300 million. This compares to typical monthly user figures of around 10 million in 2019.
To uncover exactly how much time has been spent on having virtual meetings this year, hosting.co.uk surveyed 2,000 people currently working from home.
Their research has revealed that those who have been doing it since the beginning of the first lockdown have now spent 2,189 working hours, or 13,139 minutes talking to colleagues and clients.
Almost half have joined a video call once or twice every day, with the average length of a call being 39.5 minutes. Only 15 per cent said they had never used video calls, while six per cent had joined five or more per day.
Researchers also looked at the most overused phrases in video calls. The results are amusing but unsurprising. The top five were:
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‘You’re on mute’ (43%)
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‘I think you’ve frozen’ (31%)
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‘Can you see my screen?’ (28%)
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‘Sorry, you go’ (24%)
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‘Is everyone here?’ (23%)
CEO Frederick Schiwek said: “Industries throughout the UK – and the world – have shown amazing adaptability this year. Part of this has been utilising technology that makes remote working possible, and video calls are a huge part of that.
“It’s not surprising that so many days and hours have collectively been spent on video calls as they have been an essential asset to a very strange year.”
The full research can be found here.
