WLP324 What's Going On: Control the Tech Before it Controls You!
In this What’s Going On episode, Maya and Pilar talk about the range of features in collaboration technology that could affect the way in which we work together, without us even noticing.
Recorded on 23 March 2023.
P.R. (Post Recording)
A week after we recorded, I came across Microsoft’s CoPilot and Loop.
So I’m adding to these show notes: Too much ,too fast.
Pilar
Technology is essential now for most teams, and the platforms are competing with each other like never before. Google Docs has a new look, the text editor in Trello is evolving.
Some apps are full of suggestions on how we can manager our work and our workflow, and our communication. Sometimes it’s useful to follow what the apps suggest, but they might interfere with communication or your work.
On top of this, the changes and added functionality might need us to go back to our team agreement and make different decisions about how we communicate in the platforms, and even which platforms we use.
At the end of the day, the companies behind the wonderful tools need to make money. We’ve become used to some very cool tech being free (at least some of us have!), but we are aware that behind every good app there needs to be a great business.
Seth said it well in his blog… https://seths.blog/2023/03/they-will-lose-your-data/
But, there is NO doubt: we do love the tech!
Some of the changes are making us a bit worried, like chat-based platforms telling us that “messages are waiting for your response”. Whatever happened to the slow pace of async?
”The average knowledge worker now receives notifications from six applications, and 73% of workers reply to these notifications outside of their working hours - making it hard to switch off.” https://language.work/research/killing-time-at-work/?
23.30mins
Integration of AI
Platforms and collaboration tools are adopting AI into their products at lightning speed. Even Slack is introducing ChatGPT to help you with your team communication. (hmmm…) Thanks Tammy B. for sharing this post by Salesforce.
33.00mins
Phones, phones, phones
At the end of the day, if we think about tech and communication overload, a lot of it is coming through our phones. And it doesn’t help that we need to use them often to log onto our platforms, for two-step-verification.
And now, Microsoft has even released a Teams phone!
35.50mins
We love the tech, really!
But as we said at the beginning, we do love all the technology out there and are grateful to all the people who develop it and maintain it. Here are some of the things we like:
Zoom avatars and effects. Pilar ran a Never Done Before session and experimented with using Zoom special effects to give participants a type of mask, to look for an different point of view to their own.
Kona is an app that integrates with Slack, and brings to the front the conversation around mental health. We are so happy for the founder team, including past guest Yen Tan, who were featured in The Guardian, with this article all to themselves!
(You can listen to Yen Tan in the episode 287, about remote management struggleste-manager-struggles .)
40.40mins
Other News
A new small piece of research about “engagement” during meetings with the camera on or off.
Turns out the difference between the two options is not that big, but it does vary with group size.
”Workers with a bachelor's degree or more education are far more likely to turn on their camera during video call work meetings than workers with less education. Similarly, workers under 40 are more likely to turn their cameras on in meetings (Slide 18).”
Teenagers have a totally different relationship with the camera it turns out… (And might not be what you expected.)
47.20mins
Listener input
Finally, we love it when listeners get in touch, and Richard messaged us through our contact form to share this recent “async-first” experiment by TechSmith. You can find the report here: https://discover.techsmith.com/async-first/
Do let us know your opinion on all of this! We’d love to hear from you.
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