What Was Lost To Remote, Day 3: A Full Shared Workspace
Remote Work Has Been A Meeting-Fueled Nightmare For Many.
One of the best things about meetings in the office was everyone was focused. You could see that. Of course there was always a difference between good meetings and bad meetings, but the highly successful companies found a way to do them well.
Another great thing:
Whiteboarding. I remember writing things down on a whiteboard while discussing an idea with a colleague. We’d use the board for all kinds of things:
-Content Calendars
-A Business Model Canvas
-A user persona
-A flow chart to explain how things work
Once we had written it all out, we’d snap a photo, erase it, and then send the photo to a drive where we could reference it.
Another great thing:
Index cards. Wow, what you could do with index cards. Or poster paper. Or sticky notes!
Can you tell I’m a tactile person?
Collaboration At Its Finest
It’s easy to lose track of this, but human beings actually base much of our language, and thinking, around movement. I was reminded recently from a podcast (link here).
This is why communication in the office may feel superior to remote communication: office communication taps into our natural way of thinking and communicating more completely than remote communication.
And communication methods that plays to our strengths allow us to create faster and more efficient systems for working together.
This may be at the root of why many return to office advocates are convinced that remote work is inferior for innovation: the way we evolved to think is quite constrained as our “workspace” is only ours, and only really relies on the upper 1/3 of our body.
The office, by contrast, is the perfect place to leverage our full human potential for generative interaction.
Which Gets Us To Video Meetings
When remote work became the default, the default option for collaboration was still Zoom. Many teams hadn’t ever used Mural, Miro, Whimsical, Figjam, or any number of other online collaboration product. These products would have helped “hack” the human brain in some way, getting around the need for movement to process thought by tapping into the large and well-defined part of the brain dedicated to vision.
Instead, the only tool at most companies’ disposal was zoom. And Zoom, while great for real time communication about some topics, was a poor and limiting substitute for in-person meetings in a shared space.
Is it any wonder that remote work has become synonymous with endless Zoom meetings, particularly among the uninitiated? To date most companies I’ve interacted with still don’t know how to use collaboration software, and haven’t yet wrapped their heads around the fact that you don’t need to have a meeting to communicate, ideate, and innovate online.
How To Talk About This
As with previous posts, I am going to be committing to writing content that I would want to see regarding the loss of the shared workspace. My goal remains the same: to help show empathy for the Return to Office crowd, a key first step towards a more inclusive remote work conversation.
That’s all for today. Thanks for reading.