The future of meetings

ALOBBY CAN shape the first impressions of a business. Guests at the building housing the New York headquarters of Jefferies, an investment bank, were once greeted by a section of the Berlin Wall purchased from the East German government. In the London office of Slaughter and May, a law firm, water trickles down an atrium wall into a shallow pool made of natural stone. The San Francisco home of Salesforce, a software giant, welcomes visitors with a 106-foot (32-metre) video wall displaying anything from soothing waterfalls to Pac-Man clips.As covid-19 shut offices around the world, those crucial first impressions were mediated by video calls. With workers stuck at home, corporate meetings—with underlings, fellow workers, clients and investors—turned almost entirely virtual. Anything that used to involve people crowding into spaces, from performance reviews to shareholder jamborees, roadshows and initial public offerings, moved to cyberspace.