Results

Meeting characteristics

The number of meeting participants ranged from 3 to 200 people (M = 18.99, SD = 27.24). Meetings lasted from 15 to 480 minutes (M = 93.44, SD = 68.16). Per week, students attended about 3 meetings (M = 3.17; SD = 2.90). Students reported using the following communication tools: ZOOM (41.58 %), Microsoft Teams (21.86 %), Google Meet (16.85 %), BigBlueButton (13.62 %), Cisco Webex Meeting (2.87 %), Skype (0.72 %), GoToMeeting (0.36 %), and TeamViewer (0.36 %; 1.79 % other tools).

Meeting lateness and temporal design characteristics

Only 73 (26.16 %) meetings started late which was significantly lower than the expected 40 % (p < .001). Therefore, Hypothesis 1 could not be supported.
Delays were between 1 and 30 minutes long (M = 9.25, SD = 5.48) and were addressed in 24 of 73 meetings (32.87 %). As reasons for the delay, 60 participants (82.19 %) named the absence of individual persons. Delays were also caused by technical reasons (19.18 %) or a preliminary discussion (19.18 %), missing materials (1.37 %) and other reasons (e.g., misunderstandings; 6.85 %). Meetings were terminated at the scheduled time in 133 cases (47.67 %; before the scheduled time: 7.16 %; later: 19 %). 73 people (26.16 %) stated that there was no predetermined end. Participants indicated that they classify a meeting as late if it starts between zero and 180 minutes after the scheduled time (M = 11.82, SD = 12.61). The country-specific characteristic values are shown in Table 1.
Table 1