Remember the truly prehistoric days of conferencing?
You sat around the conference table staring at the Polycom SoundStation - which looked like some sort of supersonic drone - while the person setting up the con call - generally an admin, back in the days when there were admins - tried several times to get things to work and then, each time there was a "ping," had to ask "Who just joined?"
During the conference, the person running the meeting had to keep asking those attending remotely whether they had anything to say.
While the meeting was in full swing, there was always at least one incident of background noise, often one of the folks on the phone having a convo with someone who wasn't in the meeting. And we'd all have to yell "turn on your mute."
Back in the day when we were Polycoming, I worked for a company that was meeting-mad. You could literally run from one meeting to the next from 7:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. It felt like high school, minus the bells on five-minutes before the hour. You picked up your notebook (paper based), a phone the size of a walkie-talkie, and your PDA and marched down the corridor to your next meeting.
Because we had people all over the map, meetings frequently involved remote folks. But sometimes, even those who were in our building chose to call in to a meeting.
One notorious in-the-building caller-in was a colleague named Sam who would be loudly thumping away on this desktop throughout the meeting, while we all kept reminding him to stop typing or turn on mute.
Anyway, those audio-only meeting systems weren't great. Remote people never really felt that they were part of it. And the worst thing about having them was that, all of sudden, there was an expectation that, even if you were on vacation, you could call into an "important" (as if!) meeting.
And then there were video conferencing systems.
Sure, they'd been around forever - when they'd been low function and high cost - but, with the Internet, they came up in function and down in cost.
I can't remember the name of the first video conferencing system I ever used - PictureTel, maybe - but I do remember that the latency was terrible, with lots of juddering jittering.
Time marched on, and there were any number of new and improved video conferencing systems, the most prominent being WebEx.
Not that WebEx didn't have some competition. In fact, I did some marketing consulting for one of them, a small software company in NY State, run by a bunch of genius emigres from Poland who had created a highly secure system used by the defense department, and who were now trying to commercialize it. The Polish geniuses were great, but unfortunately you needed to be a genius (just not a Polish one) to understand how to use the product. But we had us some fun.
Blessedly, I rarely ever had to use their system. But while most folks used WebEx, there were enough other systems out there that I'd run into. And have to learn a new UI: where's the mute? how do I chat?
And then there was Zoom.
Was there Zoom before covid? I'm too lazy to look it up, but once covid hit, Zoom was everywhere.
That first Covid Christmas, I hosted a smaller-than-usual Christmas Eve for family, and spent Christmas Day zooming with friends in Dallas, and friends in Maine.
The first year or so of covid, I was still working - very part time, but pretty regularly - and client meetings were all zoomed, even with local clients where I used to go in.
My writing groups started to meet on zoom. Board meetings at St. Francis House were zoomed as well.
Throughout that first scary, pre-vaccine year, I zoomed with family and friends.
And people pretty much got used to it.
These days, I'm only in one writing group, which is hybrid. It meets just up the street at the Boston Athenaeum, so I go in person. But more than half the members zoom in. I would definitely prefer fully in-person sessions, but time marches on.
These days, I only have one client, and we never meet. So I don't zoom with them.
These days, I'm off the St. Francis House board, and I volunteer on site, up close and personal. But I'm active in another nonprofit and we meet every couple of weeks via Zoom.
These days, I mostly see friends and family in person. Thankfully. (Although we're more likely to phone, I occasionally zoom with remote f&f. We know what each other look like, plus most of those calls are one on one.)
The pandemic was very good for Zoom.
Zoom enabled millions of people to do their jobs, take classes and socialize remotely during the height of the pandemic. (Source: Washington Post)
No surprise that among those millions of homeworkers were Zoom's employees.
But in recent months, the company joins a growing number of tech companies that have told employees to return to the office after promoting flexible and remote policies. Companies say office work increases collaboration, a sense of culture and ultimately promotes collaboration and innovation. Some executives have even threatened termination for employees who don’t follow the new policies. But many workers are pushing back on the office policies with some going as far as quitting their jobs over the change.
Zoom calls its plan a “structured hybrid” policy, which requires employees who live in a 50 mile radius of an office to return two days a week. The two days are determined by each team. But Zoom said even with the policy in place, 65 percent of workers are still remote because many don’t live near an office. The company also said it’s not focused on how it plans to enforce the policy, rather it’s dealing with employee issues on a case-by-case basis.
I'm with Zoom on hybrid. If I were working, I'd have preferred a 3 office/2 home model, but anything that gives employees some flexibility - and release from the burden of onerous commuting - would be just fine. And I say this even though, as a city girl, I see what happens to downtowns when there are fewer workers coming in everyday. Shops and restaurants that relied on those workers go out of business. And that's in Boston, which hasn't been as ghost-towned as some other cities.
Zoom says that it will continue to try to make accommodations for those who can't/won't come into the office at all.
And some folks are definitely aggrieved by the back-to-the-office mandates.
My guess is that employees who are the most highly valued, the most highly productive, will be cut plenty of slack, as well as those with disabilities that just plain make it easier to work remotely, while others may have to just suck it up and come in as required.
It'll be interested to see how this works out over the next few years.
I'll be watching remotely...
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