Zoom CEO says workers can't build trust or unite... on Zoom

It's not bad though. Zoom is great. Apparently their leadership sucks, but as a product its always done what I needed it to do without issue.

Isn’t this like the second time the ceo said something like that? I think he probably needs to be unseated from his position.

He’s not saying Zoom is a bad product.

Teams and Zoom are great for remote work, and I get how a lot of people love just dialing in to meetings, but there’s definitely a different dynamic to being in the office.

During the pandemic my dev team grew from two people to six. Since it was in waves we got to try being at the office and being at home using remote work only interchangeably.

Especially as a manager I see the benefits of working in the office. Not necessarily every day, but regularly.

Not necessarily from a raw productivity perspective. The office has a lot of apparent drawbacks, but these drawbacks are what triggers the dynamic that makes the office better - at least for me and my team.

I find that the office conversations triggers more ideas and better collaboration.

With my manager hat on I find that it’s easier for me to see if I need to get involved in discussions or let people handle it themselves.

People are different, teams are different, but it’s not black and white.

People love the flexibility of remote work, and some people are certainly better off working “alone” at home than being with the team, but for me it’s all about finding the balance. I don’t want to micromanage anyone, but there’s a reason a lot of people need managers, and that is simply that left to their own devices they will start working on 200 things and not finish anything.

As boring as it is our job is to deliver value to the company.

But on occasion, I will let people run wild with ideas and see where it goes. And then rein them back in when there are deadlines to be met.

Unless he doesn't believe zoom is intended to solve the problem of remote work.

There's a difference in scale of making a zoom call occasionally to add flexibility and having your entire business run off zoom for its day to day. Some things you'd want to solve for in the second but not the first case: Remote learning, team building events, snack distribution.

Offloading the entire office experience to remote isn't as easy as just using a video conferencing app.

Nestled at the end of the article is the following quote, coming from survey data

But there's also the power trip. Remarkably, a recent survey of company execs revealed that most mandated returns to the office were based on something as ironclad as "gut feeling," and that 80 percent actually regret ever making the decision.

I think the reality is that like most policy decisions at a workplace, they are based on nothing. They simply are drawn from how the people at the top feel like an organization should be or because that's simply how these decision makers are used to (or comfortable with) doing things.

We keep hearing about 'productivity' in this context. Let's explore that - back in the days when people were 5 days/week in the office, supervisors and managers concentrated on attendance and punctuality. They still could but now they are focusing on being in the office. In both cases these are proxy measures- they don't directly measure output. What is this 'productivity' here? Because the actual verifiable data tells the opposite story

On top of this, they don't care about best practices. They're shit managers who were better at getting promoted than managing people.

Meetings on Zoom suck? Well, you don't use agendas, meeting notes, etc. Your meetings always sucked, you're just missing the dopamine hit from socializing on the way to and from the meeting.

Bad employee relations? Well, your 1:1s are really only status calls. Your relations always sucked, you're just missing talking to Bill about your kids when you corner him at the coffee machine.

Missing team bonding? Well, your team went to happy hour to bitch about you. They always hated trust falls. You just miss hanging out with your yes-chums.

I think amongst all this is where people get lost. Nearly everyone is capable of having these conversations, not everyone recognizes all the opportunities they have to have them. For the older folks, they can't imagine having conversations like this anywhere but the water cooler, or after a meeting is over, over a lunch they invite their coworker to, or in a closed office. Younger generations, as you mentioned, grew up socializing on the internet so opening a DM, sending a text, or otherwise chatting off topic in a digital channel are all skills they already use. One might make the argument that short videos, text on images, voice chat, streaming, emoji, and other kinds of more modern communication modalities are all extensions of the same thought. If more CEOs and people in power spent time asking their workers and reaching out to people who are capable of socializing effectively online, rather than simply blaming the modality, we'd be in a much better place today. In fact, finding the companies which do this right is likely finding the companies which will be successful in the future - virtual work brings a lot of clear and unambiguous benefits, the trick will be finding out how to offset the negatives.

I don't understand how you do that. If you're in person, you have many ways to get a conversation going. For example:

• Seeing something they're wearing/carrying or that they have on their desk and commenting on that
• Overhearing a conversation and joining in
• Being physically present alone in a location conducive to socializing while giving off inviting vibes

You can also easily see if someone is available to chat or if they're deep in their work, and get a vague idea of their general state of mind so you know if it's a good idea to start a conversation at all, and know what to expect from it if you do.

You get none of that from video calls. You start with a completely blank slate. When you call, all you have to go on is their face looking into the camera.

A video call is also a whole ordeal. You need to set up in one location, and you're stuck there for the entire duration of the call. It takes time to prepare your headset and webcam, make sure you have water, etc. So it's hard to justify a call to just make some quick exchanges like your typical "good morning" and 2-3 sentences of small talk, whereas you can easily do that in person at no cost as you walk past each other in the hallway. You can also easily just have someone walk with you as you chat, so you don't need to make any kind of preparations ahead of time.

This is all coming from someone who's likely autistic, so maybe my experience is different from everyone else's, but I can say for sure that I have more difficulties with socializing in a remote setup than in person.

Nooo, not soon enough.

Have you ever micromanaged so hard that you micromanaged your way out of micromanaging?

[meme with the sweating guy in front of two buttons]

I love how they sometimes record these higher-level presentations, stage lights and all, right in front of where I work in the office. I am way more productive at home.

There are people who have distractions at home and want to escape of course. I'm not stopping them from working in the office though...

Yeah. I doubt they can have debates in person, either. But getting 7 people in a room so that the 2 highest paid ones can ideate all over each other while the other 5 nod along as a paid audience just feels better for those 2 than looking up to see the glassy-eyed stares of people who are trying to get their work done while sitting in on a pointless vanity meeting.

It’s funny because it’s true.

I work in a field where the vast majority of the work done requires an on-site presence. But meetings? I log into those. Even when the physical venue is a half dozen offices from me.

Lol, I am the opposite.

• Teams feels bloated and buggy.
• Zoom is fast, can handle 100+ streams with ease, and allows mods/plugins to extend as far as you want, and
• on zoom you can draw on the other person's screen while sharing.
• On zoom, when a meeting starts I have a "incoming call sound" so I drop what I am doing and jump on the meeting. (I can't install on my work compy though... Sigh)

Teams has not implemented those basic features.

Teams on Linux is pretty garbage though. They removed the desktop app and replaced it with a half-baked PWA which is exceptionally buggy on every browser, even Edge. I can't believe I did so many interviews over Teams this year, thankfully none of those jobs hired me and I got another job using Google Meet which actually works lol

Unfortunately it's the only viable option for some of our executive team meeting. I live in a country where there are two official languages and we sometime needs to have interpreters so that those who only speak one language can participate. The Interpreter feature of Zoom, with multiple audio tracks is mostly the only reason we're stuck with them.

As mandated in their invisible job description

We've already had Skype. So it's a yes.

Of course meeting in person builds more trust than video-chats

I disagree with this statement. Every study I've seen trying to examine the difference between "in person" and "virtual" has been poorly designed or resulted in inconclusive results. Retrospective studies on team dynamics often fail to account for spaces critical to trust-building such as water-cooler talk and outside of work events, and fail to replicate virtual versions of predominantly in-person activities. Studies which use naive individuals and compare person to person interaction as compared to virtual are either inconclusive because they involve tasks in which trust is built in the concept of a game and how personal someone is does not matter as much as the task at hand, or do a poor job of measuring trust and are actually measuring other aspects of interpersonal relationships.

And discussions on a real whiteboard can be much more productive than on a video call, depending on the topic.

I primarily see this as a failure of digital technologies and adoption. There are wonderful digital whiteboarding apps, but they are not included in the most prominent digital meeting technologies yet and free products tend to have a poor user experience. There's also an issue of how you are measuring "productive". Scientific measurements on productivity show that whiteboarding and brainstorming are often not actually productive when you evaluate based on the quality of the end product, despite being perceived as productive. If you're measuring how people who worked on the product feel about the direction and the end result, however, there's a bit to unpack about teamwork and managing emotions.

But the particular argument this article lays out just makes no sense.

I think the point of the article is to show that the CEOs empty words are empty and to provide a framework for which one can critically examine them. You're probably overthinking the difference in meeting modality, which is a much more complicated question - in fact, I would argue that a lot of commonly bandied insights about business are based on fluff or nothing at all, but rather "gut feeling" as the article so aptly puts it.