Zoom CEO says workers can't build trust or unite... on Zoom
Zoom CEO says workers can't build trust or unite... on Zoom
So those 218,000 enterprise customers are wrong to hold meetings on web?
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The irony of the situation still seems distant to the CEO. According to the leaked meeting on August 3, Yuan told employees that Zoom the product does not allow Zoom the company to "build as much trust or be as innovative as in the office."
Of course it doesn't. It allows people to communicate remotely. But it's not a 100% substitute for meeting people in person, and pretending otherwise would be stupid. Of course meeting in person builds more trust than video-chats. And discussions on a real whiteboard can be much more productive than on a video call, depending on the topic.
So why does it even exist
Why does the telephone exist? Zoom exists for the same reason. To let people talk remotely. It has some extra features a telephone doesn't, but that's it. It's not supposed replace meeting other people.
Now,
- I totally think that in Zoom's case, there's no real reason to bring employees to the office, and this is just a corporate power play.
- I also think there's no point for Zoom to exist when there are great open source alternatives.
But the particular argument this article lays out just makes no sense.
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.
I think the point of the article is to show that the CEOs empty words are empty
Maybe. To me it read more like: "According to Zoom's CEO, Zoom can't fully replace in-person interaction for work. Therefore, it's bad/useless software - or the CEO is bullshitting." Which is just bad reasoning. The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises. Maybe I'm just taking it too literally, but I just don't like when articles use such bad reasoning, even if I agree with their conclusion.
fail to account for spaces critical to trust-building such as water-cooler talk and outside of work events
What do you mean by that? If you are fully virtual there's going to be no water cooler talk - but that's a legitimate difference between in-person and virtual that should affect the results of the study. So it makes sense to me that the study shouldn't try to control for that.
and fail to replicate virtual versions of predominantly in-person activities
I don't think you can. Take for example board games as an in-person activity. The virtual replacement would be video games. A video game can do everything a board game can (with some exceptions) - but it can do so much more. So, purely from a game design perspective, video games would be much better. The main thing that video games don't have, while board games do, is the in-person interaction. Yet, there's plenty of people who play board games, but not video games. Clearly the in-person part is important.
If you are fully virtual there’s going to be no water cooler talk
Physically, yes, unless you're attempting to recreate a water cooler in VR or something. However, I would argue that offtopic slack and teams channels and direct messages offer similar benefits. Dedicating time at the beginning of meetings to just chat, or otherwise encouraging off-topic chatting can also be a decent stand-in. This can all be enhanced by being a little bit more openly personal at work - having worker directories or homepages where people submit pieces of information about themselves or customize it to their liking can also convey the same or similar information that's shared in water cooler talk environments.
When I said they fail to account for this, it's that they aren't comparing to mediums which convey the same information in different ways. They're comparing a rich, diverse communication environment to a deprived one. These considerations are important when you're trying to make the evaluation of whether the medium is at fault or whether you've just poorly controlled additional factors.
I don’t think you can. Take for example board games as an in-person activity. The virtual replacement would be video games. A video game can do everything a board game can (with some exceptions) - but it can do so much more. So, purely from a game design perspective, video games would be much better. The main thing that video games don’t have, while board games do, is the in-person interaction. Yet, there’s plenty of people who play board games, but not video games. Clearly the in-person part is important.
This isn't a well-controlled comparison. You're comparing two vastly different things. Comparing board gaming in person to VR board gaming might get you closer to understanding what is important or higher quality about an in-person interaction versus a virtual one, but even then there's still many aspects which are tough to control for. Generally speaking most science I've read on the subject has to do with the quality of communication present. Comparing text to audio to video mediums we've found out many important differences between modalities of communication. With only text, it's difficult to fully understand what people are trying to communicate - adding an audio medium allows for a more complex message to be conveyed, which is once again improved with the addition of body language and further complexity which comes via video. The difference in complexity of message between video and in-person mediums primarily has to do with the quality of the signal and the tools permitted. The difference in how we perceive the two has a lot more to do with personal preference and complexity of the message than anything else. There are important considerations to be made here, but I have yet to see any studies which show any meaningful difference in message between the two mediums, unless we add additional complexity such as messages which involve other senses such as ones which incorporate smell or touch.
which is once again improved with the addition of body language and further complexity which comes via video.
Maybe it's just me, but, I 've never felt that video calls add the body language element that in person communication has. I mean, I get a very different feeling (and my facial expressions, are different because of that) when looking directly at the camera than the one I get when making eye contact with the other person. Doesn't this mean that you actually add an altered body language to the interaction?
Or is this something included in what you meant with "further complexity"? Not sure what you were referring to there.
Complexity or density of communication has to both with the modalities involved (auditory, visual, etc.) as well as the richness of what is conveyed (how much information is conveyed in each modality). I spend the majority of my time focused on the modalities portion of communication because it is most relevant to the discussion around communicating via different methods such as text vs phone vs video. However, you are correct to point out that how rich the communication is depends on the modality.
The most common way this shows up is an issue of hardware - if the camera you are using is of low quality or the internet connection cannot support it, the video signal is often compressed and information is lost because of this. What is available in frame versus not in frame also affects the richness. If I'm sitting in a chair and the camera can only see the upper 3rd of my body, you would be unable to see what my legs or feet are doing, which affect the richness of the signal. In addition, as you've mentioned, people act different in different situations - they may not communicate the same body language in all modalities. Human behavior itself is important when it comes to the richness of information conveyed. In fact, people often modify their behavior in response to the reduced richness of the signal! People have 'phone voices' when they are on the phone where they exaggerate or flatten their voice to counter information that is lost via transmission depending on their pitch register and other factors. A 'radio voice' is another common way in which people modify their speech over an auditory medium to enhance the signals they care most about. When communicating purely via text, people can add images and emojis, or change the very message itself to be sure important pieces of information are not missed (such as adding lol or /s to convey meaning). Even over visual mediums people find ways to change their behavior in response to the modality and may exaggerate certain movements or learn to conduct themselves in specific ways to ensure the communicated message best matches their intent.
I think it's also important to note, as you did, that these changes and differences aren't always intended and are a direct response to the medium and how we think, as well. It's not uncommon for people to be entirely uncertain where to look when using a camera to project themselves to others. People often get nervous and change how they interact when speaking in public. Observing a child who's only just learning that you can talk to people over phones or video chat exposes all kinds of idiosyncrasies of communication. People go to school to learn how to act on a stage, in front of a camera, over the radio, and through other mediums to become better communicators in mediums where richness might be affected or where they want to learn skills to better convey the same message.
This isn’t a well-controlled comparison.
It is. If you're going to virtualize a board game, there's no need to stick to the limitation of a physical board game. So, once you make full use of the virtual environment, you get a video game. If you compare to just virtualized board games, then you're artificially disadvantaging the virtual side.
PS. I also added this significant edit to my last post (bad form for discussion, but it makes more sense there than here)
I think the point of the article is to show that the CEOs empty words are empty
Maybe. To me it read more like: "According to Zoom's CEO, Zoom can't fully replace in-person interaction for work. Therefore, it's bad/useless software - or the CEO is bullshitting." Which is just bad reasoning. The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises. Maybe I'm just taking it too literally, but I just don't like when articles use such bad reasoning, even if I agree with their conclusion.
MS Teams comes with a pretty good Whiteboard app as well.