  A primary goal of remote collaboration tools is to provide effective and
inclusive meetings for all participants. To study meeting effectiveness and
meeting inclusiveness, we first conducted a large-scale email survey (N=4,425;
after filtering N=3,290) at a large technology company (pre-COVID-19); using
this data we derived a multivariate model of meeting effectiveness and show how
it correlates with meeting inclusiveness, participation, and feeling
comfortable to contribute. We believe this is the first such model of meeting
effectiveness and inclusiveness. The large size of the data provided the
opportunity to analyze correlations that are specific to sub-populations such
as the impact of video. The model shows the following factors are correlated
with inclusiveness, effectiveness, participation, and feeling comfortable to
contribute in meetings: sending a pre-meeting communication, sending a
post-meeting summary, including a meeting agenda, attendee location,
remote-only meeting, audio/video quality and reliability, video usage, and
meeting size. The model and survey results give a quantitative understanding of
how and where to improve meeting effectiveness and inclusiveness and what the
potential returns are.
  Motivated by the email survey results, we implemented a post-meeting survey
into a leading computer-mediated communication (CMC) system to directly measure
meeting effectiveness and inclusiveness (during COVID-19). Using initial
results based on internal flighting we created a similar model of effectiveness
and inclusiveness, with many of the same findings as the email survey. This
shows a method of measuring and understanding these metrics which are both
practical and useful in a commercial CMC system.
