Back in November I took a shot at predicting the future of meetings – how virtual they would be once we were able to go back to work.  I theorized a 2-tiered system, with virtual meetings persisting for the cost savings and speed they offered, but face-to-face meetings predominating when the quality and importance of the meeting mattered and cost took a back seat.  At that point, here in the US, we were still in quasi-lockdown and waiting on our vaccines.  Now, half a year later, vaccination is relatively widespread, covid is on the retreat, and most businesses are accelerating their plans to get workers back in the office, on the road, and meeting with customers.

What are the portents saying now?  To put the question in its starkest terms, who is going to win out – the CFO or the CMO?  The CFO has wrested back the travel and real-estate budgets and gloried in a year of cost-savings and improvements to the bottom line (all else being equal).  The CMO, being an extrovert, chafed at the limitations of Zoom, struggling to connect with employees and customers.  She made do and was surprised at the productivity that teams were able to deliver.  But she has been haunted by the idea that a rival company would win business by going the extra mile of face to face when it counted with a big customer.

I saw a recent study from MIT (https://news.mit.edu/2020/hunger-social-cravings-neuroscience-1123) that found that extroverts suffer more from pandemic-imposed social isolation in proportion to the extent and quality of their social interactions – compared to introverts.  Not a huge surprise, but a marker nonetheless.

Who’s going to win?  From this vantage point, still having only anecdotal information to go on, the crystal ball is slow to clear, but the outlines are becoming visible.  It’s going to be an extroverted marketer’s world once again.  Before the pandemic, the usage rate for video communications amongst the biggest companies in the US was 5%.  For small companies, it was apparently even less.

Post-pandemic, I’m predicting we’re going to end up closer to 15% than 30%, and certainly nowhere near 50%.  The pendulum is going to swing back.  Once organizations see their rivals offering face-to-face opportunities, they will jump in with both feet because the emotional deprivation has been real and the need to congregate is an enduring human trait.  And who wants to be the company that didn’t care about you, the customer, enough to meet with you face to face?

People in the travel industry tell me “most of the passengers thronging the airplanes now are still families getting back together, business travel isn’t quite back yet, but wait until the new fiscal year!”  I predict a business travel boom in 3Q-4Q, with the US leading the way, but Europe picking back up as soon as the vaccines near 50%.

The psychology of the current moment is much like that of the post-9/11 world.  Then, once the fear was (mostly) gone, business came back to life, adjusted to some new restrictions, and soon was making up for lost time.  What was different was that some people made big life changes because of the stark reminder that life could be short.  But most people just got back to their usual lives.

And that’s what we’ll see later this year and early in 2022.  People getting back to their lives.  And some people – a surprisingly small percentage – making permanent life changes because the pandemic taught them something fundamental:  life is short, and you should live yours doing something worthwhile with people you care about.

Here’s hoping you are well-launched on that journey.