How to improve the efficiency of teams in and after covid times?
Imagine you are running a company or you are responsible for a team which cannot work together?
I mean working together in the context of working in the same office or attending a common meeting room on a very regular basis.
This is how team collaboration used to be before there was that virus which tried to separate people. And it was nearly successful!
But as so often, there is always an upside included in everything. At least for successful people. Where some just might see the issue, others see the possibilities.
Here it is clear. What we lost in the quality of communication which was possible due to working at the same place, sharing the same office, going for lunch and so on — what we lost there, we gained in other places. By having more people working remotely we gained a lot of time. Time we usually spent on commuting, in whatever way, we can now spend on things and people. Rather than wasting in traffic.
But the loss in quality of communication is there you might say. Sure, no doubt about it.
And we have to do something about it, not just being the witness of the end of good team work.
That remote loneliness cannot be overcome completely of course. People still need to meet up in real life, get the feeling for personal relationships, work hand in hand (literally) and enjoy the warmth and comfort human beings give.
Ok, sounds gloriously nice and beautiful these meetings, but we already noticed that there is that other life, with less meetings as well! How about that.
Online meetings you say. Sure, they exist for a good reason and if planned and done well, executed carefully and with the utmost respect amongst the participants they work out great.
Expectably there are some drawbacks with online meetings. Participants might not be sufficiently concentrated to follow the discussion, might quickly write that ubiquitous message on their preferred messenger service, there could be a really important live stream about the falling of a sack of rice in China and so on. You get the idea. Nobody speaks about it, but everybody has witnessed it for sure. There are those people whose eyes always wander somewhere else but on the screen where their colleagues are. Waiting, speaking, trying to explain, hunting for understanding.
Please don’t get me wrong, online meetings are *really* a fantastic thing, I do loads by myself and I couldn’t imagine how modern day workflow and environmental consciousness would be possible at all without online meetings. It’s just so that they are not as perfect as one might like them to be. But still the biggest hassle is not during the meeting, but before.
Ever faced that endless discussions about when to meet? Especially if people working in different time zones are involved. From own experience, it gets really trick for someone in Europe to meet with colleagues in Sydney and LA for instance. This might be an extreme example of course, but even without the geographical challenge it isn’t always easy to find a time where several people are able to join a meeting. And even if they were able to join, they might not be in a condition to contribute as well as they could.
No, I am not speaking of them being drunk of course.
Just imagine them hurrying from one meeting to the next, wanting to share knowledge and experience in one meeting while they should, in theory, already prepare another meeting and so on. I am sure you all know what I am talking about.
Being part of a meeting without any noticeable progress. A meeting which in the end just is another portion of wasted time. Time, sliced from your life time. But wasted. Didn’t bring the meeting forward. Didn’t bring your colleagues forward. Didn’t bring the company forward. Didn’t bring the team forward. Didn’t bring your career forward.
Just the usual Sh*t.
If you are an efficiency junkie this is hurting even more. Because it is not only the above wasted but a diametral counteract of your whole existence. To me, meetings without a proper outcome are hurting like physical pain. To me they are like an unholy mixture of insult and injury.
What did Freddy Mercury, genius lead singer of the band “Queen” sing:
I want to break free.
Me too.
You might have guessed it already, there is a way of overcoming these challenges and downturns.
There is a new variant of communication and experts who are much smarter and way better looking than me believe that this is a revolution in communication, not just a small step of evolution. Probably like if Neil Armstrong hadn’t left the last step of the ladder but jumped off it and flew around the whole moon just with the power of his mind.
Voice from the off: Come on, come to the point now, what is it?
Ok, ok. Here we are.
Saying it in the most complicated way, but technically correct:
Asynchronous communication!
Say what?
That means communication which doesn’t necessarily require the participants in that communication to be live together at the same place and not even at the same time!
You communicate whenever you are in the best position to do so.
We are all doing that for ages. Letters, Telex, Telefax, E-Mail, and all sorts of messengers do that.
You write something and the other reads whenever it is feasible and convenient.
But the limitations are obvious, you have to use words, and sometimes really a lot, to try and describe and explain what you want to say or show and demonstrate. Written messages are often fine of course but sometimes it is nearly impossible to describe what you could show in a second.
So, curtain falling: Just record the screen of your computer. Combine it with your voice and include your camera picture to underline what you are saying, put your personal presence thus wight on what you are showing.
Show in a really efficient way what you want to say. Show it on your screen and enjoy the greatness of your audience.
There are already some tools available on the market to record your screen, some for free, some pay ware and some freemium. Some were lean and sleek, some overloaded with functions so that you can hardly find the screen recorder in the screen recorder.
We had an urgent demand of using such in our office about a year ago but we just couldn’t find the right product. I mean, the really right product.
One which stands actual real life requirements and not just a quick comparison table where longer is usually regarded as better.
We are using different platforms for instance. We work on Unix, Windows and Macs. Rules out a lot already.
And a lot here are using different browsers, for various reasons 🤡 don’t ask. This rules out the next batch of available screen recorders.
Some are picky regarding privacy and requested end-to-end encryption. From here on all available screen recorders ruled themselves out.
But we still had some other requirements:
I hate downloading and installing tools on my computer. Although I am allowed to do so, no nervous admin who keeps from installing stuff, I — don’t — want — to. So it needs to run just in the browser, without any extension or so.
And we didn’t want to send around large files of course (see above, section efficiency junkies)
So it needs to be stored in a cloud and send just as a link.
We just couldn’t find what we are looking for.
So we decided, it’s time again to do it like real programmers. And make the better screen recorder. Not as a commissioned task but out of the necessity and out of the urge to have the best possible product.
And here it is: www.calipio.com
All the above, sleek, convenient, nice and efficient. All one, as we think, should like.
According to Cisco 82% of all Internet traffic by 2022 will be video content and I actually do know why that is and what kind of content it will be.
Nothing less than a real revolution in communication.
Try it out, it is for free and your first take can even be done without registration.
