How Many Online Meetings Per Day?

I took an analytical approach to figuring this out as there is very little data on the Internet. We all know that the population of the United States is around 350 million people. But there are a lot of people who don’t work jobs where they are stuck in endless remote meetings. Then I decided to focus on just the information technology and tech sectors. There are roughly 12.5 million people working in this sector in 2021. These individuals do spend endless hours in remote meetings watching and presenting. My own research has shown that the average professional has at least five meetings a day. This results in over 60 million remote meetings using PowerPoint a day in the US alone. If you extrapolate this to the EU and Asia, assuming similar statistics and demographic profiles, we can argue that there are 200 – 400 million online and hybrid meetings today that use PowerPoint.

How Effective Are These Meetings?

Why are we all so disengaged? Is PowerPoint helping or are we using it as a crutch?

I found some fantastic research that articulates the problem:

• 90% of people believe that a strong narrative in a presentation is critical for engagement
• 55% of people say a great story is primarily what holds their focus during a presentation
• 46% of presenters feel that the hardest part of creating a successful presentation is crafting a compelling story

Storytelling is important in presentations—but it’s also difficult. Many presenters find it hard to come up with a narrative that works both for their data and for their audience. Most of us leverage the content that our marketing teams give us, and usually this is a linear PowerPoint presentation. A lot of people ask me how they can transform meetings and remote sales presentations using the tools that they have as we are not all born storytellers.

Storytelling is Not Hard with The Right Tool

The trick I discovered is to tell a story using your existing content, where nothing has to be changed. We, and our marketing teams, did invest a lot of time and effort in creating amazing visuals and PowerPoint slides. So, let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water, lets reimagine our presentations so we can take it to the next level without a lot of effort.

According to research, effective presentations engage the audience using different elements:

• 38% of your audience engagement is driven by your voice and how confident and authoritative you are
• 55% of your audience engagement is driven by your body language, facial expressions, and other non-verbal communication cues
• Only 7% of your audience is interested and engaged by the content itself