I think another factor at play here is that with remote meetings, there isn't a sunk cost in people physically travelling to the meeting room. It can feel silly to bring 4 people to a place to meet just for 4 minutes, especially if they're coming from other floors or other buildings. Remotely it feels fine. Blip in, blip out.
The opposite for me. I used to be able to turn around on my chair and have a chat with my supervisor who sat just behind me. If other people were needed, we could just be like "Philip, can you come over a second, we have a question". Now we have to ask people if they're busy and setup a zoom meeting.
I understand this inertia, but I have also worked in remote teams where you can just jump on a call instantly without any friction and equally end that conversation in under 30 seconds.
Zoom is a little clunky for that - if you have something like whereby.com you can have a named room for yourself so you don't even have any friction to find a virtual place to talk because it is preestablished which really makes the talk feel serendipidous.
With push notifications on rooms, team members can pile on a team room if they are free and watch to listen in in case it's interesting to them. Equally with push notifications people can come to your room if they're looking for you.
But it's also a lot less intrusive than a phone ringing. If you know the room people are in a call in, you can interrupt them (because sometimes you do need to get hold of people right this second).
It can really feel like the low friction parts of an office with the right mindset and buy in. Obviously there are pros and cons to having that low activation barrier but I find them a net positive overall.
It really can be as simple as "hey can we chat" or "@team - quick call?" and then drop all the formality of a meeting and approach the call like as if you walked up to their desk to say hi.
I just get poked on slack. Question answered. Life carries on.
The advantage there is I can choose when to respond which is never the case in shoulder tapping office environments and meeting schedule negotiations both of which are disruptive.
Email is even better than meetings and disruptions!
At Automattic, p2 is even better than email. For example, I’m subscribed to projects that I am interested in or have some expertise in. I’m also subscribed to a few keywords that I get notified if anyone in the company mentions publicly. You get the benefits of everything you mentioned without the exclusivity of email.
This is why I like Remotion [1], it has the best affordances I've seen that replicate turning around your chair and having a quick chat. You can set your status to Away (can't connect), Available (request to connect), and Open (auto connect). Rather than take up your whole screen, its just a few circles of faces, so you can continue your work or collaborate while chatting.
I think Remotion works best for small teams that have a certain operating rhythm and informality to them. The clunkiness of Zoom et al reflects the formality required of cross-organization collaboration, where things must be scheduled, everyone's expected to give their undivided fullscreen attention, politics dictates relevant parties all have a chance to speak, etc.
Big Corp I work for has really poor office with 2 small meeting rooms. And this was huge limiting factor for meeting organization. Managers thrive nowadays with no limit for meetings, every nonsense gets discussed for hours. I spend half day in some weird discussions every day. I don’t see how make this stop.
Reject meetings without an agenda and fixed time slot; feign unstable internet connection if need be, or indicate you have another meeting (e.g.) half an hour after the start of the one. Also make sure to block your calendar for focus time, lunch and breaks.
That‘s the question I asked myself too. How did they measure that?
Average working hours:
So Switzerland: 41 hours [1]
Germany: only 15% over 45 hours [2]
Austria: around 41 hours too [3]
And it seems European average is also around 40 hours [3] .
Edit: Ok, that‘s what i found:
> Workday Span- The average daily number of hours in between the first and last email sent or meeting attended by an individual in a 24-hour day block. The 24-hour day block is determined by 12am-11:59pm in the user’s local time zone. This variable is calculated by taking the number of hours in between the first and last meeting or email for each user’s 24-hour block and then calculating the average across users for a given MSA.
So if I write an email at 6am and another at 6pm, I would have worked 12 hours in this statistics, even though I was the rest of the day in the mountains (or otherwise out-of-office). I ahree that it‘s a nice way to measure working hours like that, but I myself sometimes write an email before breakfast and then have a lengthy breakfast.
Having started working remotely just before the pandemic hit (good timing I suppose), I was curious how the daily schedule would be different. I am sure that being at a remote-experienced company is better than companies starting it for the first time in general! In general my meetings are shorter but they also help give me a little of the face to face time I need to ask the random question or get to know my colleagues better.
I am seeing this same situation with my kid’s and his friends remote learning for school as well. We planned on our kid going to remote school this fall and it seems pretty well thought out, but some of our friends had the school switch to remote for the first few months at the last minute. It has been a disaster for the most part! So the lesson to me is to NOT treat remote exactly like in-person... there are advantages and disadvantages but if you try to copy in-person to remote it will not be successful.
All sorts of little things that would be clarified through casual in our cubicle farm now need formal meetings to make sure everyone is on the same page.
