Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype, Google Hangouts are all here to stay, but in my view what is missing from virtual working are three distinctly aesthetic elements of corporate culture: rituals; symbols; and myths.
A UK company has just passed 1 million Microsoft Teams meetings in their organization of 40,000. As a result they've made accelerated progress on strategic goals, learnt a great deal including how virtual meetings are causing fatigue but also realigning how files are stored and structured, and that ultimately there is still a place for a real office with colleagues in it.
MS announced in June 2020 a number of ways to make virtual events less exhausting. The new features include 'Together Mode', which places a live avatar of meeting participants in a virtual setting, and is aimed at making videoconferences feel more natural.
"It was totally motivated, conceived, prototyped, tested, and realized during the pandemic," said Jaron Lanier, scientist at Microsoft Research, speaking of Together Mode. "I suspect had it not been for the pandemic, it would have been years of testing and development to release something like this."
In spite of all this COVID era progress, people still want to go back to the office to see their colleagues.
However hard we try, technology isn't going to be as energizing as the physical world in my view because it lacks some basic human needs. I was listening to the story of the destruction of the Mar Elian Monastery in Syria by the ISIS forces. Once this 4th Century monastery was destroyed the Christian community dissipated after 1600 years of continuous inhabitation based around a building and remains of a sacred person.
It says something about the need of people to belong and for the leaders of organizations to create symbols, rituals and myths which sustain people. So I raise the question about what business leaders can do to send the symbols of the company culture to their staff in their virtual offices; if there are to be millions more meetings we need to link teams not just with software but with culture.
Jim James is the Founder and Managing Director of the EASTWEST Public Relations Group. He recently returned to the UK after 25 years in Asia where he was an entrepreneur. Whilst running EASTWEST PR, he was the Vice-Cha
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Monthly subscriptions start at $3 per month. At $1 per hour, that's much less than the minimum wage, but we'll take what we can at this stage of the business.
Of course, this is still free, but as an entrepreneur, the actual test of anything is if people are willing to pay for it.
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Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype, Google Hangouts are all here to stay, but in my view what is missing from virtual working are three distinctly aesthetic elements of corporate culture: rituals; symbols; and myths.
A UK company has just passed 1 million Microsoft Teams meetings in their organization of 40,000. As a result they've made accelerated progress on strategic goals, learnt a great deal including how virtual meetings are causing fatigue but also realigning how files are stored and structured, and that ultimately there is still a place for a real office with colleagues in it.
MS announced in June 2020 a number of ways to make virtual events less exhausting. The new features include 'Together Mode', which places a live avatar of meeting participants in a virtual setting, and is aimed at making videoconferences feel more natural.
"It was totally motivated, conceived, prototyped, tested, and realized during the pandemic," said Jaron Lanier, scientist at Microsoft Research, speaking of Together Mode. "I suspect had it not been for the pandemic, it would have been years of testing and development to release something like this."
In spite of all this COVID era progress, people still want to go back to the office to see their colleagues.
However hard we try, technology isn't going to be as energizing as the physical world in my view because it lacks some basic human needs. I was listening to the story of the destruction of the Mar Elian Monastery in Syria by the ISIS forces. Once this 4th Century monastery was destroyed the Christian community dissipated after 1600 years of continuous inhabitation based around a building and remains of a sacred person.
It says something about the need of people to belong and for the leaders of organizations to create symbols, rituals and myths which sustain people. So I raise the question about what business leaders can do to send the symbols of the company culture to their staff in their virtual offices; if there are to be millions more meetings we need to link teams not just with software but with culture.
Jim James is the Founder and Managing Director of the EASTWEST Public Relations Group. He recently returned to the UK after 25 years in Asia where he was an entrepreneur. Whilst running EASTWEST PR, he was the Vice-Cha
In return, I will continue to bring massive value with two weekly shows, up to 3 hours per month of brilliant conversations and insights.
Monthly subscriptions start at $3 per month. At $1 per hour, that's much less than the minimum wage, but we'll take what we can at this stage of the business.
Of course, this is still free, but as an entrepreneur, the actual test of anything is if people are willing to pay for it.
If I'm adding value to you, please support me by clicking the link now.
Today, we're going to talk about some of the learnings that have happened for the company that has held over 1 million Teams meetings online. We'll also discuss the impact of symbols and how when we're working from home and when we're in virtual places, the symbols, the culture, and the rituals that we have in our offices and workplaces are missing. This may also, in my view, add to this sense of fatigue, because not only are we not surrounded by our colleagues, but we're not surrounded by the things and the places that normally fuel a company culture. I was talking to another dad today as we were dropping off our kids at a sleepover. This fellow father who has been working now from home during lockdown since March shared that his company has now got the distinction of hosting over 1 million Microsoft Teams meetings. They have 40,000 members of staff, and he said that it's transformed the way that they run their business. Interestingly enough, he said that they've been able to accelerate their strategy implementation from taking nearly 30 months down to only six months. They saved a massive amount on travel, on incidentals, and simply, time. With Microsoft Teams, they can host meetings with 400-1,000 people in a way that wasn't possible before. He shared with me the impact of polling, of taking all the questions in advance and letting the meeting attendees vote for which ones that they wanted to address first. It wasn't always the case that the the people in the field were asking the questions that the management team wanted to answer, but it was giving them a forum to do so. The management team was also very aware that if they didn't take these questions seriously, they'd undermine the whole process of this democratic sharing or town hall meeting. What we're seeing today is that some new protocols and new ways of working are needing to be established in Teams, Zoom, Skype, or even Facebook. We're moving into another phase of maturity, and this fellow father was saying that they're such a large organization that they actually work directly with Microsoft on some of the input of the of the program. He said one of the implications is that file sharing and file archiving are now being fundamentally changed, because in the same way that people would go to a meeting and share a PowerPoint or documentation with one another in the room, now people are sharing documents whilst they're in an online meeting. When it's impacting 40,000 people and over a million meetings, you can just imagine the scale of the issue that's being being faced. They're talking about the need to integrate email, for example, in the cross-organization search. With platforms like Microsoft and Zoho, we can really see the complete ecosystem of the business being online. We also talked about how psychologists have been working with that dad's company on the impact of Teams, the volume of these virtual meetings, and fatigue. He said they were encouraged to turn off their video when they're not speaking, because it actually creates latency between what you're saying and what you're hearing. Also, we become self-conscious about what we look like on screen rather than just focusing on the person speaking. I hadn't really thought of that before, but it's quite true that if we're both "watching" ourselves and the person speaking, we're a bit distracted. Say you're in a meeting at the office, you wouldn't be constantly looking yourself in the mirror, but you are when you're on a videocall plus, of course, there's the anxiety of how your home office looks, possible children coming in, a dog barking, a delivery arriving, and so on. There's a lot of things going on that are contributing to fatigue. Microsoft is now looking at ways to make virtual events less exhausting. They launched a Together Mode in June, which displays avatars of meeting participants. In other words, you wouldn't put your yourself online. Instead, you would have an avatar representing yourself there. The benefit of avatars is they could look a bit more consistent and professional. Jaron Lanier, a scientist with Microsoft Research, said he conceived, tested, and realized this new Together Mode during the pandemic. He said, "I suspect that if it hadn't been for the pandemic, it would have been years of testing and development to release something like this Together Mode." So, we're getting some software technologies being developed specifically because of COVID and within the COVID timeframe. This means that the likelihood of going back to how it used to be is increasingly slight, because software, as we've seen, has made massive advances across everything from security to background to audio to screen sharing, and the like. Microsoft is also adding a dynamic view which allows a more flexible presentation. They're allowing simultaneous live streaming of video and a smoother transition between participants, so it's not quite as tiring to have people drop in and out. These are some of the aspects we're seeing between Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype, Google Hangouts, or whatever we're using. There's a myriad of, as I've mentioned, dedicated virtual conference and tradeshow platforms as well. What I've also been thinking about is why then, with all the benefits that this fellow father is talking about, how he's been able to be home for weeks for the first time in his working career and loving how much time and money he's been saving, he's still missing going to the office. It led to me thinking about how what we're missing is also the camaraderie at the office. That father talked about missing the ability to engage with his team members. On my way home listening to BBC Radio 4 about the destruction of the Mar Elian monastery in Syria by the ISIS forces. Now, how does one segue between Microsoft Teams and the destruction of a fourth century monastery in Syria? Well, the answer is because it was a pilgrimage site, and it sheltered hundreds of Syrian Christians who had survived and huddled in this sanctuary in spite of the onslaught of the the ISIS forces. The ISIS forces arrived, and they captured the French priest, while his community stayed around the building. Eventually, the French reverend escaped, his following came in, and they decided they must all leave this part of Syria near Palmyra. They did so, because the monastery have been To them, it was more than just a place. It had been a symbol of hope. It had been where they held their rituals, where they would come to pray, where they would have a certain social order, where they would have their culture of what they would wear and what they would read, and where they had their symbols of their faith, their crosses, scepters, and crypts. These are all elements that, as human beings, bind us to one another. They're the essential elements of any culture that we need, these rituals, these symbols, these myths, and stories that validate why all of these things exist, why they matter, and what they represent. I was struck that this Syrian town had lost this ancient monastery that had been dedicated to a fourth century saint. For 1,600 years, people have been going as destroyed. pilgrims to this site. And over a short period of time, a group of people had managed to destroy it, not just the building, but the hope and the faith that these Christians had. Coming back to our working lives, most of us have lost the symbols, the rituals, and the myths of our work env ronment. By working at home, we' e tried to create new env ronments, but most of us are wor ing in places that are not sur ounded by the same kind of peo le for sure, and they're not sur ounded by signage. We're not sur ounded by someone at rec ption who welcomes us and ask us how our day was. So, how many of us as company owners have sent anything to our teams in their home working environments that represent a symbol or a link to the busines? It's an opportunity, I thin, that we're missin Everyday, I hold a daily huddle with my team in Singapore and
the UK. At 8:
30, we have a call with one team, and at nine o'clock with another, and we have a routine that we go through. It's based on the Verne Harnish's Rockefeller Habits, by the way. However, that's still not the same as walking into an office and feeling the energy of everybody else in the room, or watching other people enter, and getting excited about a joint project. And so, as we talked about the 1,000,000th team meeting that this fellow father and his company had held, there was a sense of great joy at the simple productivity of virtual meetings, at the time saved from not having to drive or commute to work, the money saved from not having to go for lunch and coffee, no longer needing to replace expensive suits, but what we also were lacking as two men standing outside a kitchen in a country house was some of the paraphernalia. We were missing the church. We were missing the temple. We were missing the factory. We were missing some context for the conversation. The wife and the children were running around, and the dog was barking. We were having a great freewheeling conversation about things that were useful and productive and important and professional, but in an environment and context that were completely not professional. It made us seem just slightly out of sorts, really. It made me think about how churches, factories, or sports stadiums are more than just places. They're icons. They are centers for us to have our rituals, for us to store our symbols, and also to perpetuate the myths of great sporting heroes or great staff. This is why of course Steve Jobs' office is still left just as it was or in the Morgan factory, why Peter Morgan's office is still left in the way that it was. As we think about our teams this week, wherever they are, from a communications perspective, how can we energize our staff, our teams, our clients, and our partners? How can we represent the symbols of our business and share this with our staff? Can we send tokens? Can we send background logos? Can we send t-shirts? Whatever it is, what can we do to help people reengage and feel that there are some symbols or icons that they can touch base with? Maybe fatigue isn't just about the loss of energy caused by sitting at the screen. Maybe it's also the lack of energy, because where we are working right now is not imbibed with energy. Our circumstances are different now, because most of us are trying to counter the environment we've got with family and small people, so we're not in an environment that's giving us energy or support. As a company, if we're responsible for those people working in those environments, I just wonder, could we send company-branded material to our staff? In the strictest sense possible, myths are not true, which is why we have the the choice of the word myth instead. They're stories told of and by our members of the community. As I was hearing about how the myth of the fourth century saint who had founded the Mar Elian monastery in Syria had bound people together, it was clear that he had really given his people a sense of purpose and a sense of energy to withstand amazing pressures and physical harm. As we look to lead our organizations and our people around us, and as we encourage and inspire those people to dedicate themselves to work, I would personally be thinking about what rituals, symbols, or myths can I create to make everybody feel that this is a worthwhile organization, that EastWest PR is something they can believe in, that it has a mission and a purpose, that it can give guidance when there may be an absence of it? All of us are under a lot of pressure, but this is when we also can show great leadership, and leadership will come as we all look deep within us, look forward, and decide what's important. As we were all surrounded by our families today, this fellow father and I realized, of course, that this is what's important to us. Now, the challenge is figuring out how to turn the background where we have them with us into a productive and a compelling workplace.