WLP247 What’s Going On with Remote Work, Tech, and the Office Space
Welcome to our monthly What’s Going On round-up - coming to you from Pilar’s summer home recording booth in Spain, which includes a duvet hanging on a broom handle secured by clamps… The things we do for your acoustic pleasure.
Today we discuss tech, the future of the office, the future of life, housing and work life balance, and an upcoming event.
If you have a news item you’d like us to take a look at please do send it to us, and don’t forget you can always…
3.29 Let’s talk about some tech
Maya shared this piece that she wrote for UC Today about AI-Driven Accountability, to discuss the way the Callbridge meeting platform AI is turning online meetings into actionable content. By grabbing keywords, agenda items, decisions and frequently mentioned words, it makes meetings far more searchable and indexable than any video file normally is, and is part of a trend bringing new transparency and accountability to meetings and business decision-making generally. This kind of functionality is in emergent stage now but is going to be increasingly important.
Pilar found another product working similarly https://tldv.io/ “too long, didn’t view”, which lets you intentionally tag and highlight meeting content as you go along, for future actionability - a different approach to the same idea, of making meeting content useful and easy to refer to afterwards.
Microsoft are doing some stuff along these lines too, so we’ll doubtless be back to this theme. Will we change the way we do face-to-face meetings in the future, and what does it change, about the ideas of conversations being on the record or not?
SO many unforeseen consequences, to the 2020 remote revolution...
12.20 The future of the office
A couple of articles from The Guardian here: UK office demand 'shifting to the suburbs' amid Covid-19 crisis, highlighting a more flexible approach to office use going forward perhaps, highlighting research from IWG (formerly Regis), who are evidently seeing a local high-street renaissance - working locally could be the new working from home, perhaps. They also provide homeworking packages, of furniture, stationery, etc.
Similarly, The age of the office is over – the future lies in Britain's commuter towns | Simon Jenkins (shared with us by Richard MacKinnon from My Pocket Psych), from which we find the statement: “Morgan Stanley survey shows that even now only 34% of British office workers have gone back to work. This compares with 76% in Italy and 83% in France.”
So, people in the UK clearly do not feel safe going back to big city centres despite government urging (but can we start talking about going back to the workplace, because most of these people have been working very hard right through all this, just not from the usual location, and the lazy ‘back to work’ phrasing negates all of that).
Finally a crazy alternative to working from home you might not have considered… MGM Resorts Rolls Out Ultimate Work-From-Vegas Package At Bellagio And ARIA ‘Viva Las Office’, if that’s what you want. Yes, it appears to be for real. Enough said!
23.06 Work-life balance and boundaries
An excellent series of articles recently in Harvard Business Review, we particularly recommend:
Building Work-Life Boundaries in the WFH Era - which talks about separators vs integrators, as an interesting frame for the extent to which people seek to divide or blend their work and personal lives. Maya and Pilar are very different to each other on this front, and as a lens through which to look at what works or doesn't work for individuals it reminds us that one size does not fit all - we need to tailor remote work solutions to each person’s needs and preferences.
Another in this series, Microsoft Analyzed Data on Its Newly Remote Workforce - was a fascinating deep dive into actual data - we love facts, and now that work is digital we can actually measure and analyse interactions in new ways. We invite you to dive in and take a look, at the role of messaging, the role of managers and collaboration, how work is time-shifting in new ways… There is so much in here, such as the insight that managers sent 115% more IMs in March, compared with 50% more for individual contributors. This research also starts to address the behaviours and patterns which we are starting to take back into the shared workspace, and looking at what changes in the way we work might be inclined to stick, for better or for worse.
37.15 Back to tech - well, email anyway, and a cool event:
The Basecamp/Rework team built a new email app Hey, and have been discussing this in their podcast and answering user questions. It’s a great story, about bringing an app to market against the app store Goliaths, but is it going to transform email?
Maya got onto the beta, and admired the way they approached organising the messaging flow. If you were new to email this would be a great place to start! But you can’t bring in existing POP3 and IMAP addresses - you’d have to forward stuff in and out, and Maya couldn’t make it work with her existing workflow (and definitely didn’t want a new email address).
Essentially, the Basecamp team built the app they wanted, and fair play to that! They have rolled back on some decisions following user feedback, such as adding signatures. So, it’ll be interesting to see how this develops, as there was a lot to like here, and maybe we just need to think more radically about how email COULD be, instead of where we are starting from and what we’re used to?
Another company we admire, Buffer, is putting on a ‘first ever audio-only conference’ for brand builders: Built to Last – Audio Conference for Brand Builders.
We love the idea of this being an audio-only event, and what this means for the differentiation of the overcrowded and screen-driven online event space. So we look forward to hearing how this went!
46.09 What’s going in the Virtual Not Distant community
Rowena Hennigan (see episodes 215 and 244) and Sandra Thompson have set up RISE Emotional Intelligence - make sure you are subscribed so you don’t miss a fascinating interview with them in an upcoming episode.
Brian Rhea (who took part in our ‘Connection and Disconnection’ podcast series with Shield GEO earlier this year) has written The Manager’s Guide to Engaging Remote Employees, about engaging remote workers - do have a look, it’s really in depth and comprehensive.
Lisette Sutherland’s Work Together Anywhere book is now in Japanese - remote world domination continues - おめでとう, Lisette!
Pilar has a workshop on planned spontaneity on the 3rd of September with Next Stage Radicals, so we’ll let you know how that goes/went (depending on when you’re reading this.) Pilar was also a recent guest on their own podcast, so that’s well worth a listen.
The Visible Teamwork Guide will be published *very* soon - so do look out for that, more news asap, and the full book will follow.
And finally, Pilar has a new newsletter to subscribe to, ‘Think, Write, Converse’ - sign up on her site, for a glimpse into Pilar’s mind!
And do keep your feedback coming, we really enjoy it - please contact us, or you can tweet Virtual Not Distant, or Pilar and Maya directly, with any of your thoughts and ideas, or if we can help you with our training, coaching, and facilitation services during these challenging times.
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