Will COVID-19 change how we work?
It’s been about a month since life as we know it was turned upside down around the world. The streets of London, Paris and New York are now a ghost town. Even as Seoul and Shanghai return to work and school, in large swathes of the world people are following government advice to stay at home.
Obviously there are many whose lives have been disrupted unimaginably, through the severe illness or death of friends and relatives. If you spend a lot of time on social media, however, you will notice that the professional lives of many have now been taken over by Zoom.
Zoom is just one videoconferencing technology, alongside Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Hangouts, Facetime (and the bad boy of the bunch, Houseparty, with its questionable data privacy policy), but it has already come to define the era that it feels like we’ve been through since this whole thing started.
The Zoom UI has become a familiar image across Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, as employees and managers alike flaunt their productivity and show how many people they managed to pack in to one video conference call. Even the UK cabinet is now being conducted on Zoom, with attendant commentary on the home décor of ministers: is that a Union Jack flagpole in the living room of Liz Truss, International Trade Secretary?
Amidst all this breathless adoption and promotion of video calls as the future of work, you might be forgiven for thinking that we are seeing a once-in-a-generation shift towards working remotely, and that this can be just as effective as huddling together in an infection-prone glass tower somewhere. There’s only one problem: nobody likes doing it.
Multiple friends and family members have spoken of the great fatigue they experience from repeated video conferences over a day, especially when those calls involve many different people. It is much more tiring and harder to concentrate when the information flow is only in one direction at any given time.
Inevitably, even in a meeting with multiple speakers, people will often end up orating and speaking in longer chunks of time, simply because changing speaker is a clunky and unnatural process online, whereas in person a small interjection or discussion is the essence of communication.
In other words, Zoom is not ideally suited to any use case: for a speech, the speaker feels like they are talking in to a void, while the minds of the audience wander; for a more engaged discussion, people are constantly stepping on each other and you can’t have the flow of debate you could in person.
This is not to mention the importance of body language and non-verbal cues, which are both essential to communication. Without these, conversation is denuded of so much of its potency, and so much of its power to entertain and inform.
To take one example, classes at Columbia have now gone online, so we are in a position to compare the new digital experience with the physical in-class experience we enjoyed before the holidays. Conversations with friends reveal that students enjoy the Zoom classes much less, because they do not feel engaged.
As a former teacher, I would argue that the learning process depends on some kind of alchemy between pedagogue and students, where a mind is fired up and encouraged to follow energetically along the paths of their curiosity. This simply cannot be replicated on video, where instead a third of the class concentrate, while a third play on their phones and another third are probably cooking lunch. For that reason, students pay a premium for an in-person experience. The MBA is an especially acute example because we are sold on the basis of the network we are able to build — something that becomes infinitely more difficult if not impossible online.
With one-to-one conversations the experience is much better, but of course a professional context demands meetings at least some of the time. The biggest change during quarantine will be that it becomes more acceptable to work from home a few days a week, since many managers will observe that the company can run, at least in the narrowest sense, with some team members away and dialing in.
However, ultimately the primal importance of human contact will reassert itself, and humans will return to their old social patterns. The word ‘corporation’ comes from the Latin ‘corporare’ meaning ‘to combine in one body’. Simply put, if we do not combine, we cannot be a corporation, and claims of the death of offices are criminally overstated.
