Virtual is the New Reality
Zoom, Skype and Microsoft Teams usage up by huge percentages
98% of Goldman Sachs employees working from home
Zoom and Skype cocktail parties and wine tastings
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a dramatic impact on how we all work and interact with each other. To maintain safety and health, millions of people are working virtually. (And, unfortunately, it’s had an even more dramatic impact on the millions of people who can’t work virtually.)
In just the last two weeks, clients have asked us to:
Convert their Strategy Creation efforts from in-person meetings involving groups from across North America into virtual processes.
Translate traditional classroom-based training programs into a blended learning approach combining elearning, webinars and virtual coaching.
Develop custom leadership development programs that can be delivered virtually.
Shift a series of “culture assessment” interviews to be completed virtually.
While we’ve worked virtually with clients for much of the last two decades, this is a sea change in the level of interest in moving work to a virtual environment.
The Next Normal
Once we get past the immediate crisis, the pendulum will certainly swing back at least somewhat. We are social beings. We want to see each other face to face, hang-out, enjoy each other’s company, drink a beer together rather than on a Zoom call! We’ll go back to the offices we’ve abandoned over the last few weeks. We’ll go back to meeting face-to-face at least some of the time.
But we’re also learning that we can be as productive, or even more productive, working virtually than we can meeting in real life. (Ignoring, of course, the truly inexplicable fascination with compelling TV like Tiger King!)
Traveling for meetings or learning events is expensive and time consuming.
Much information transfer can be handled as effectively and more efficiently in a virtual environment.
Traditional training and develop can often be delivered far more effectively remotely/virtually than in a traditional training/classroom session.
From a broad economic and societal perspective, the costs of physical space and the personal and environmental costs of commuting to and from offices to do work that can be done from home, is enormous.
So, the “next normal’ almost certainly includes a much greater level of virtual work and collaboration than the pre-COVID19 “old normal.”
Making Virtual Work Work
Being productive and working in a virtual environment will cause us to RETHINK…
1)… how work gets done
Working virtually allows us to organize work more effectively.
We facilitated a virtual strategy session for a client with 15 people in six different locations. The session was built around traditional thinking of a physical meeting for a full day session. The virtual session went great, far better than anyone expected. But it was clear…two hours into the 8-hour session…that holding 2 or 3 shorter sessions might have generated better analysis and conversation about the organization’s strategy than one 8-hour session.
If you assume that people need to physically meet, the “full-day” design makes sense. You’re not going to put 15 people from 6 different locations on planes for a 2-hour meeting, then do it again the next week, and then, again, a third week.
But, if you rethink how the work gets done, meeting virtually allows you to break the work into more logical chunks and generate better outcomes without the waste of time and energy spent traveling.
2) …the “logistics” of work
Check your technology – I was talking to a leader of her company’s information technology team last week. Her organization had re-deployed their team to work from home. They first hurdle they had to jump: many of the organization’s IT people didn’t have adequate cameras, microphones and/or speakers on their computers! If the IT folks don’t have the right technology, what are the odds that everyone else does?
Evolve your tools – In a virtual world, we can’t lose sight (pun intended) of the need to maintain human contact. Skype calls, Zoom or MS Teams conferences with the video turned on are far more engaging and build better connections than relying solely on emails, texts or even voice-only calls. Tools like Slack and MS Teams can help you better organize group work, make information available to the people who need them and allow instantaneous conversations that actually keep people better connected than they might be in a physical environment.