b'VIRTUAL ANNUAL MEETINGThe virtuesof virtual meetingsThe 2020 Annual Meeting in Hawaii is far from the only in-person get-together to fall victim to the COVID-19 pandemic. Around the globe, companies and other organizations have cancelled in-person conferences and other meetings for the first time in their histories. In fact, even as early as April, 90 percent of event planners had reported cancelling in-person meetings. In most cases, these meetings have been replaced by virtual meetings. One virtual events company indicated that between March and May, the number of virtual meetings held on their platform increased by over 1,000 percent. And the growth in the popularity of virtual meetings shows no signs of reversing.While it might feel like the advent of virtual meetings coincided with the arrival of the pandemic, meeting online was gaining in popularity well before the word coronavirus became part of the global lexicon. As one corporate communications expert said in Sept. 2019, Online meetings are increasingly preferred, even if everyone is at the same facility, because workers can generally hear and see the presentation better online. What many managers knew even thenand a great many more know todayis that virtual meetings offer numerous advantages over in-person meetings. Here is a summary of several of those advantages.AAP Periospectives| 8'