The Impact of Social and Technological Interventions in Video Meeting Systems
The usage of video meeting systems has increased over 3500% in the last 5 years, particularly in the post-corona era (1). However, users of video meeting systems are confronted with several challenges (2), such as lack of engagement, reduced accountability, trust and productivity as reported by a literature survey of Smith & Ruiz (2020). Thus, there is a need for advancing video meeting system designs.
Our framework: Hybrid adaptive systems
To advance the design of video meetings systems, we orient ourselves to the conceptualization of hybrid adaptive systems, that intelligently adjust their behavior or configuration based on real-time feedback from both the environment and user inputs (Benke et al. 2024).
In hybrid adaptive video meeting systems social entities (i.e. individuals, teams and groups, as well as institutions) are continuously co-adapting themselves based on the inputs and outputs of the adaptive IT system.
Our research approach
Wearing the lens of hybrid adaptive systems, we aim to first investigate the impact of different designs in the form of socio-technical interventions in video meeting systems on virtual team collaboration. To investigate this empirically, we adopt an interdisciplinary approach, addressing the following central research question:
RQ: How do social and technological interventions in pre-play video meetings impact virtual team collaboration?
Using the same setup and task in all interventions, we investigate how different interventions in video meeting systems impact virtual team collaboration. The study is implemented using Otree (Chen et al. 2016), an open-source platform for laboratory, online, and field behavioral experiments as well as JITSI (4) as the underlying open-source video meeting system platform.