La mayoría de nosotros tenemos una relación de amor y odio con las reuniones. El auge inducido por COVID de Zoom, Teams, Webex y el resto ha hecho que las reuniones sean más fáciles de organizar y asistir (o ignorar educadamente si apaga la cámara), y también ha puesto a los trabajadores remotos en pie de igualdad con todos. Pero pocos dirían que la videoconferencia ha mejorado drásticamente las reuniones.
Some short-term improvements can help change that. With hybrid work likely to become a permanent fixture in the workplace of the future, a flood of innovation in conferencing technology has been unleashed. I believe this will forever change our assumptions about how we meet and ultimately make our workplace meetings more productive and inclusive. It will take a while to get there, but the stars are aligning to alter the way we meet in some pretty fundamental ways.
More, better meetings
On the one hand, we are likely to have more, shorter, and more focused meetings. Face-to-face interaction can now happen on phones, tablets, and even watches. There is no longer a reason why everyone who wants to participate in a meeting can't be there. Meetings will also include more people. We can easily engage third party subject matter experts to provide advice where necessary and available. Video conferencing has already redefined the corporate meeting, historically a top-down, one-way public speaking, into a more inclusive discussion. The 45.000 devices and some 100.000 people who participated in a video call before the Jewish sighting of 3 Tammuz last June are testament to the fact that interactive meetings can now go global. Observers no longer need to be passive. Zoom and Teams already offer real-time polling, allowing meeting planners to take the temperature of people in the virtual room, get feedback on ideas, and steer conversations more productively.
innovation flood
Collaboration technology creators are currently struggling to bring new features to market. Cisco says it has introduced more than 800 new features and devices to its Webex video conferencing system since last September alone. Expect the best ideas from each technology provider to be widely adopted by all.
Microsoft offered a vision for future conference rooms that incorporate large screens with cameras at eye level and spatial sound that makes it easy to know who is speaking. Virtual assistants will be organized in a familiar panel format with each virtual assistant sitting at the same virtual table. Presentations and chat discussions will merge into the workspace instead of being separated into separate windows. Shared whiteboards will allow people to mark up the work of others. Large video monitor manufacturers will make a killing as all of these features eat up a lot of screen real estate.
In most cases, the technology to do all of this has been around for some time, but there was little incentive to use it when most meetings were held in a common physical space. A changing workplace will cause technology providers to trivialize these advanced features.
Some startups go even further. Gather creates virtual spaces that resemble backyards, parks, and other common community spaces in an experience reminiscent of Second Life. Pluto takes a similar approach, selectively allowing visitors to walk around and interact with others. Both aim to replicate one of the most ineffable aspects of office life: informal meetings that foster relationships and spark ideas. While currently targeted at consumer markets, the most popular features of these platforms will migrate to commercial use over time.
Two features are already becoming a permanent fixture in the business meeting landscape: recording and transcription. Recordings transform the transient nature of meetings into an archive that can be accessed to document exactly what was said and by whom. Major video conferencing systems now offer transcription options that deliver remarkably accurate results, including correct attribution of statements to speakers. This gives us an instant, searchable archive of complex multi-speaker conversations, and technology will only get better.
People will continue to be the weak link in business meetings. There isn't much technology can do about vague schedules or unintentional annoyances. But as advanced features become more widespread, we can expect behaviors to change as well.
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