Does decision making take longer in a remote or hybrid working environment?
I now put such high value on meeting in person. It's like a perishable product: We have to do it because I don't know the next time we're going to be able to. Or maybe it’s just because it's Thursday and we're not going to see each other again until Tuesday. But if we meet over Zoom, it feels infinite, like we can just meet again tomorrow and the next day. Whereas when you get folks to all meet in person, it creates a sense of urgency to get through whatever you need to accomplish.
In a virtual meeting, everyone’s taking their turn to speak, but when you’re in the room together, you have side bars, you’re talking on top of each other, and then 25 minutes later you reach a decision. When it’s a virtual meeting, you think, “I have 30 minutes free on Wednesday for lunch, but I don't really need to eat, so we could just meet then.” And with all these people attending, it becomes a very expensive meeting. In an in-person meeting, if two people who are having a side conversation happen to figure out the solution, they can pursue that while the rest of the group works on whatever they need to do. In a virtual meeting, those two people could go into a break-out room or chat via direct message in theory, but it's just not the same.
The way you interrupt in Zoom conversations seems so much more rude than it is because you’re talking louder than the other person so your box lights up, which lets them know that you're trying to speak. It's very aggressive. I often wonder if people think I'm way more aggressive than I actually am as a result of the way I interject in meetings.
During the first covid lockdown, we took a decision within a week to move 100% of our software development team to work from home. We have to make sure the connectivity and facility of each employee who works from home. It almost 2 years since we are working from home without any issues.