I hear a lot of debate about Remote working and how people do need to be in the same office. “FaceTime is the only Realtime”. The need for FaceTime is real — that much I agree with. It’s the frequency where I tend to differ in these discussions.
Some unplugged time chatting with colleagues and shooting the breeze is valuable. But lets face it for most of us our work happens on whatever device you are reading this on right now. Or a connected device of some sort anyway a laptop (MacBook if you are lucky) desktop or mobile device.
It must be meetings that people want then? Of course meetings are valuable but only when they are valuable — not because someone called one. Many meetings we all know are the most expensive wastes of time and costs to business. Often they are completely pointless. With collaboration software the need for many meetings goes away.
OK sales presentations, networking and a few other examples make sense. But the cost of getting to them, the space and the time used is so huge they need real justification.
So Slack, Basecamp, WhatsApp — use all the tools get stuff done right now — don’t wait for the meeting.