There is no question that videoconferencing tools have saved companies from a pandemic lockdown crisis. There’s little question that familiarity with the tools will promote their use in the future, even when there’s no pandemic to drive change. They may indeed replace voice calls for many business interactions, even those involving only two parties. We’ve had some time now to absorb videoconferencing and web conferencing into business operations. What have we learned?
Five organizations I’ve been chatting with (virtually, of course!) have been working on this optimality point. They’re not unified in their thinking yet, but there is an emerging set of common points leading to their view that “we have to work differently, not just work remotely.”
The critical starting point everyone agreed on is that companies are too culturally dependent on face-to-face connections in getting things done, and there’s little reason for it. All five of the companies said they’d believed that their people would find working via video a significant drag on productivity. In-house discussions were thought to be marginally acceptable via video, but contact with customers, suppliers, and prospects that had previous been handled F2F? Expect the worst. But the worst didn’t happen; they found that not only were they able to get things done via video collaboration, there were actual advantages in using it.
For these companies, video collaboration saved people about 38% of their time versus F2F. They were able to “get a meeting” on the average two days sooner when they were trying to reach a customer, and cut the time to respond to a customer request for a meeting from a day and a half to three hours. It took a bit of time (two weeks or so, on the average) to get used to the new way of working, but once the learning curve passed, the results were a major improvement in productivity.
Another point that emerged is that providing people with material to review and work with during collaboration further improved not only efficiency/productivity (by about ten percent), it improved the subjective view of the results of the virtual meeting. In most cases, people used a white-board to do extemporaneous drawings or worked from a slide deck. The companies found that if the material was prepared and sent in advance, there was a slight increase in time committed per meeting to review the material, but the meetings were shorter. The net was an improvement in productivity.
What created the improved subjective result was partly that the meeting came to point faster, making it “feel” more productive, and that the material seemed to be better absorbed. The optimum approach seemed to be to schedule a video meeting with a short period in advance tacked on for material review. If the material were sent at the beginning of that review period, the imminence of the meeting induced an immediate review, and the information was better retained for the meeting itself.
Most of the companies noted that there was an evolution to the way they prepared the material, and that shift was likely a major reason why the meetings seemed to produce better results. Because the material was reviewed unsupervised, those who prepared the material were forced to be more educational in their approach, and that meant the material was grasped quicker. The meeting then tended to focus on questions, and on confirming key points, which again gave it an “action feel” that improved the subjective view of the outcome.
Another interesting point that came out of my discussions was that the companies found that their virtual meetings got smaller over time, as people became familiar with the process and introduced their material for review before the meeting started. First, having more people meant much more time to accommodate everyone’s schedules, and since the virtual meetings were normally quicker to initiate than F2F, that extra time was a noticeable delay and drag on the process. Meetings shrunk from inviting an average of 12 people to an average of 7, without any reported loss of effectiveness. In addition, another one or two would, having reviewed the material, determine they didn’t need to attend. Since the virtual meeting doesn’t interrupt things as much as F2F would, people didn’t resent last-minute drop-outs.
One company took all this information and developed a “meeting track” approach, using project management and scheduling software. They’d tried in the past to create a project trajectory that included the necessary meetings, but found that with F2F meetings there were too many cases where people couldn’t make the meetings or they ran long. With the new virtual approach and previewed material, they were able to keep to schedule for most activities, and the meeting-track approach further improved both their control of task execution and their overall efficiency.
A fair question on the findings is whether work-from-home created or exacerbated the classic problem of “theft of time”. Many companies worry about home working because they’re convinced that people wouldn’t work as hard, and all five companies said that there were issues with that, for some workers and some managers/supervisors. They also said that having a meeting-track approach where work activities were explicitly scheduled, including video collaboration, helped reduce the problem significantly. Most said they didn’t believe that where the approach was used, there was a need for any sort of monitoring of the kind usually seen as “spying”.
There’s a qualifier for all of this, though. The subjects of the detailed reviews these five companies did were “knowledge workers”, largely staff experts and managerial/executive types. There were a few administrative people also reviewed, those who worked regularly with other high-level people. Four of the five companies also had a broader collection of office workers at home, and they all subjected them to only minimal study. Why? Because this groups WFH activity didn’t involve video.
One of the interesting truths here is that the majority of WFH workers do their work without a need for any significant collaboration. They can process invoices, take calls from customers or suppliers, or run their regular applications without being video-empowered. The four companies all felt that “more could be done” to support the non-collaborative model of remote work, but they’d not really done it. We may have learned a lot about video collaboration as a replacement for F2F meetings, but we still have a long way to go learning about remote work.