No, I don't think I need a robot on wheels to roam the office and join a meeting room when I can just join a video call.
All the tech for remote work is here already, all we need is a change in mentality to get wider acceptance of remote work.
All the tech for remote work is here already, all we need is a change in mentality to get wider acceptance of remote work.
People in general suck at communication.
Those teams that are the most productive and produce the most - those that produce 10, 20 or 100 times more value than average teams do one thing really well that all the others suck at. Communication. They gel together well and produce a lot because they communicate well.
I've had a handful of experiences of working on teams that have 10X-100X productivity and I've loved working on every single one of them. They all had flawless and free flowing communication, whether you were in the office or remote, you were always kept in the loop. Their infrastructure was designed to facilitate ease of communication whether you were at your desk, in a meeting room, at home or on a beach 1,000 miles away.
Every single one of them, without exception designed their businesses to facilitate communication before they thought about anything else and every single one of them didn't skip a beat if everyone was in the office or the whole team was working from home, or even in the same time zone... and they don't need telepresence robots to assist with that.
Those that don't communicate well don't produce even when everyone's together in the office. Telepresence robots aren't going to help them communicate. We tried a device that was like an iPad on a Segway when I was at Kobo. It was a hilarious gimmick for a couple of weeks before we all decided it was stupid and went back to Bluejeans/Slack which was more than sufficient to communicate effectively.
Yes, but is it critical ?
Do you really need that high fidelity interaction everyday of the week, all month ?
I feel a lot of strategies can be used to mitigate the need for that much bandwidth and hi-fi interactions. There’s orgs where some people working together only meet once a week or once a month.
If I remember well github teams only physically meet once every many months.
There are of course downsides to that, but the upsides (e.g. living a healthy life) can compensate them largely enough.
I would argue that is not the tech that was referred to.
>All the tech for remote work is here already
I'm not sure collaboration software/hardware is really there yet. It incrementally improves and at least part of the problem is probably getting widespread adoption of some specific solutions.
But working on something collaboratively in a conference room versus remotely is still a lot better for certain things. Mind you, I don't think tech can ever get all the way there for some purposes but it feels as if we can still do better than we do.
Can you please provide examples? Between Zoom, BlueJeans, and other conferencing software, I've yet to run into any collaboration issues that would have been solved by office visits. There's also the fact that most conferences now use screen-sharing as the default means of presenting, with many attendees calling in from their office desks.
The biggest problems I've encountered are usually centered around lazy or ignorant usage of the tools. For example people dialing in from some noisy environment with the mic on by default. This is becoming less of a problem though as it's no longer taboo to call them out for their negligence.
That said, people could probably use tablets more systematically for sharing hand-drawn/written stuff in real time. Some of it is about adjusting to the realistically available tools as well. For large meetings where some people have to be remote, for example, we've switched things that we would have historically probably written on a whiteboard to shared docs online.