Meetings are dead

Meetings are dead

But landlines and fax are just as obsolete, according to Kipp’s poll. Here are the business communication tools you can’t live without.

August 23, 2010 1:17 by Samuel Potter

It is official, at least in Kipp’s eyes: The business meeting has had its day. According to our latest poll, just 7 percent of Kipp readers think face-to-face meetings are the most valuable communication tool in business. So for those of you forced to spend hours of you working life every week in pointless or stymieing meetings, rejoice: you can now tell your colleagues there are more effective ways to communicate.

And the meeting isn’t the only old-school approach falling by the wayside, according to your responses. Fax machines, and even landlines, are a total irrelevance – they received no votes each. Not one; 0 percent. It seems that, for Kipp readers, even the desk phone is a secondary communication option when doing business.

And maybe we are making too much fuss over VoIP (Voice over internet protocol) the technology that allows you to chat via the internet using voice or even pictures. At least, we are making too much of a fuss over using it for business purposes. There are ongoing concerns over Middle Eastern governments’ attitude to services such as Skype; they see it as taking revenues away from often state-owned telecoms firms, and so attempt to ban the sites. Kipp has several times reported the threat to business of such a move being fully implemented.

But in our survey, just 3 percent of respondents felt that services such as Skype were vital business tools. Perhaps the uproar in trying to prevent the use of VoIP is more likely to be about personal use; in a city of expatriates, these tools are an important link to friends and family in distant lands.

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