Tag: team video

Data Roundup: Employee Surveys Show Increased Support for Remote Work

Post author By Adam Riggs
Post date March 24, 2021

Businesswoman sitting at a desk with her laptop looking through window with her dog in home office .

The early months of the COVID-19 pandemic were overwhelmingly uncertain for businesses forced to test remote work arrangements. Now, nearly a year into the pandemic, employers are still making significant changes to their remote work arrangements, suggesting that hybrid working models are here to stay.

But how are employees coping with working from home? Is there still enthusiasm for workplace flexibility, or do employees want to return to the office when this is all over?

We’ve gathered recent data suggesting that workers are increasingly comfortable with—and in favor of—remote work.

Tags subtask, team video

remote work

Is it Time to Say Goodbye to the Corporate Office?

Post author By Adam Riggs
Post date March 10, 2021

Modern open space loft office with concrete floor, big windows a

In 2017, many companies made headlines for doing away with remote working arrangements, including IBM, Aetna, and Best Buy. While working remotely had previously been seen as a driver of employee satisfaction and better business results, these high-profile flexible work program cancellations caused many companies to question their work from home policies.

Then came 2020. The business world experienced a significant shift toward remote work because of COVID-19. The data we’ve seen a year into the pandemic reinforces what studies have suggested for the past decade: yes, remote work can boost productivity.

But does this mean that companies will continue to embrace flexible working arrangements even when offices reopen?

Tech Companies Signal Hybrid Work Futures

Increasingly, leading companies are introducing policies supporting a hybrid work future, where in-person and remote work opportunities are blended at the company. Some roles will need at least some in-office time to complete critical tasks but otherwise enjoy greater degrees of flexibility than before—and employers are making lasting decisions about their office spaces because of it.

Throughout 2020 and into 2021, brands made significant moves that signal it will become increasingly uncommon for a company’s entire team to work under one roof:

Cloud computing trailblazer Salesforce announced in February 2021 that it will offer three ways of working going forward. The company even went as far as to say the 9-to-5 workday is dead, and only a small subset of the Salesforce team will work in the office four to five days per week.
Internet staple Google will keep its employees remote until September 2021 and then experiment with a new hybrid work model giving employees the flexibility they desire.
Trillion-dollar company Microsoft announced that the majority of its employees can work from home half of their time (or permanently, with manager approval) and that its US offices won’t reopen until early this year at the earliest
Tech giant Pinterest paid $89.5 million to terminate its lease with a soon-to-be-built complex near Pinterest’s existing San Francisco HQ
Retailer REI announced its plans to sell a newly finished corporate campus in Washington, which was once called “like summer camp for grown-ups.”
Nationwide will work out of four main corporate campuses, exiting most of its other buildings and workly entirely remotely in all other areas.
Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman expressed uncertainty about the future of work but noted that the bank would need “much less real estate.”
Siemens, one of the largest companies in the world, recently announced it would “focus on outcomes rather than time spent in the office” in measuring worker performance.

Tags Closing corporate HQs, flexible work, hybrid workforce, team video

productivity

Enhancing Workplace Productivity In The Age of Remote Work

Post author By Adam Riggs
Post date March 3, 2021

man working on a laptop at the kitchen table with toddler on his shoulders

In the past, many companies equated “working from home” with “slacking off from home,” fearing the potential productivity losses their company would face if employees had greater workplace flexibility.

Now, a year into the largest remote work movement the business world has ever seen, these fears have been largely overcome. Productivity in the U.S. rose 4.6% in Q3 of 2020, marking the largest quarterly productivity increase since 2009.

But there’s a catch: not every company is seeing productivity boosts with its mostly remote workforce. One study of 800 employers found:

67% of companies reported similar productivity levels as pre-pandemic days
27% reported an increase in productivity

So what’s separating those seeing gains in productivity from the rest? It could be in how they define productivity and the tools they’re using to track it.

Tags remote work, team video

online meetings

How To Combat ‘Zoom Fatigue’ For More Fulfilling Video Meetings

Post author By Adam Riggs
Post date February 24, 2021

Employee face-down on their laptop, suffering from burnout

The rapid shift to online, remote-based work provided many benefits for employees and employers alike. These flexible working arrangements are here to stay, even once COVID-19 is no longer a concern.

There is an unintended side effect of this new way of work, though, and it stems from ineffective, badly designed tools and misguided approaches to handling meetings with a remote team: “Zoom fatigue.” But by understanding the cause of this fatigue, you can adjust your approach to online meetings in a way that better engages your team.

What Is Zoom Fatigue And Why Are Video Calls Tiring?

Despite being a convenient replacement for our in-person interactions, video calls require a more significant effort to truly process the conversation (the primary cause of Zoom fatigue).

That’s because a great deal of crucial content is communicated not in what we say, but instead in how we say it, with nonverbal cues like hand gestures, facial expressions, and eye contact. Intrinsically, video calls make it difficult to absorb these nonverbal cues. Only so much of any given speaker can be seen, spotty internet connections can distort speech, and grid-style views can easily send an attendee into sensory overload.

Tags team video, Zoom fatigue

remote work

When You Can’t Measure It, You Won’t Fix It

Post author By Adam Riggs
Post date August 17, 2020

According to Google Trends data, as much of America’s knowledge workers settled in for the second month of working at home under the COVID-19 work from home mandates, ‘Zoom fatigue’ hit an all-time high. But the truth is, it’s not just being stuck at home and having most of our socializing taking place over video conference calls that are to blame for our dissatisfaction with workplace meetings.

Whether it’s 9 million versions of conference call bingo or 21 million views of a conference call in real life, poorly-run company meetings have long been a source of employee dissatisfaction. A 2017 study published in Harvard Business Review surveyed 182 senior managers in a range of industries to gauge how meetings impact their work:

65% said meetings keep them from completing their own work
71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient
64% said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking
62% said meetings miss opportunities to bring the team closer together

Many factors contribute to this negative outlook on workplace meetings, but one that has bubbled up significantly over the last few months is meetings are often where the lack of diversity and inclusion in the workplace shows up.

Tags measurement, online meetings, team video, virtual meetings

online meetings

3 Online Meeting KPIs That Can Uncover a Toxic Workplace Culture

Post author By Adam Riggs
Post date August 11, 2020

With an estimated 42 percent of the U.S. labor force currently working from home full-time, your online meetings have become how you keep your workplace culture alive. Unfortunately, these same virtual meetings may also be contributing to creating a toxic workplace culture that leads to employee disengagement.

The good news is, unlike those in-person meetings held in your company’s cleverly named office conference rooms, your online meetings give you the potential to gather and measure data that can be used to identify and address potentially toxic workplace issues in the making. Here are three questions to ask your team members to weigh in on, and measure through your online meeting platform.

Tags KPIs, measurement, online meetings, team video, virtual meetings, workplace culture

online meetings

Introducing now.me

Post author By David Chester
Post date July 30, 2020

Today we are excited to share now.me — a way to get right to the meeting you’re supposed to be in right now. At any given moment, if you visit the site, it will look at your calendar, see what video call you’re meant to be in, and take you right there. It works with most video call providers, including Zoom, Google Meet, Whereby, Social hour, and others. We have been using this tool internally for a while now, and thought we might as well share it with the world.

In a way it seems like a small problem to solve. It’s not so hard to open up your calendar, find the meeting you’re supposed to be in, find the link to it, and open it up. But at that moment when it’s time to get together with your clients or colleagues, that time is precious. We want those brain cycles in to go toward preparing for the conversation that is about to take place. Especially if we’re running late, or if we’re trying to get together materials to share, or deep in thought pondering whatever trade-offs we are about to weigh — it can make a big difference not to have to context-switch at that moment.

As we use now.me, we find ourselves dreaming of next iterations: Beautiful as it is in its current state, it could be nice to add support for custom themes where we could set our own images, or toggle dark mode. Another idea we’ve pondered is an option to keep a now.me tab open, and then when a meeting is about to start, it would show a notification and even automatically join the meeting in a new tab, with no interaction required.

We’d love to hear your feedback! Try it out at https://now.me

Tags now.me, online meetings, team video

online meetings

Zoom treats you like a child

Post author By David Chester
Post date June 26, 2020

Deeply ingrained in Zoom’s defaults are choices that do not encourage us to expect the best from each other. We spend such vast amounts of time in video meetings now that we should question what behaviors our platforms are driving us to, and how they affect our interactions with our friends, family, and colleagues at work.

“Waiting for the host to start the meeting”

This message can be infuriating. The host is on vacation, or they’re in a car somewhere, or they’re there but having trouble logging in. Or worse, everyone wonders, who is the host of this meeting, anyway? Is it me? Am I holding us back at this moment? For God’s sake, when will we be able to get on with the actual work we have to do?

And really, why can’t we just carry on without the host? Of course if you go into all the right admin screens and click all the right buttons, you can turn this off, but since it is the default, this experience inevitably creeps in.

Tags team video, Zoom limitations

online meetings

Camera on or off? A UX approach to video meeting fatigue

Post author By Jessica Wu
Post date June 25, 2020

Video conferencing is the new office / living room / dinner table / doctors office…

As the spaces of our social lives have transitioned to a limited number of software interfaces, fatigue and burnout has skyrocketed taxing our mental health and productivity. While video conferencing apps are keeping us employed and connected, they are not prepared to handle this mass shift in our daily routines and social interactions.

What makes video conferencing so different?

When we spend our days sitting in our makeshift offices and personal spaces staring at our coworkers, friends, doctors, teachers and families (and don’t forget ourselves!) in little boxes on our screens we miss so much of the social experience of real face to face interactions. We’re unable to read body language, engage in normal social rituals, have serendipitous conversations—to move!

We’re also responding to a unending amount of new information that our brains need to process—our personal lives surrounding us at home, the apartments and houses of our coworkers and their personal lives happening around them, the host of distractions on our desktops and the lure of almost unnoticeable multitasking.

Tags meeting fatigue, team video, UX, Zoom fatigue

Tech Companies Signal Hybrid Work Futures

What Is Zoom Fatigue And Why Are Video Calls Tiring?

“Waiting for the host to start the meeting”

Video conferencing is the new office / living room / dinner table / doctors office…

What makes video conferencing so different?

Take your virtual events to the next level