Am I alone in this observation?
I am not referring to presentations or town hall type of meetings where information is shared with large groups. These are team calls where active collaboration and decision making are meant to take place.
In the past, when we could meet in person, I could see every participant's body language. I could see when people who did not say a word during the meeting were actually actively listening, leaning forward, or showed signs of disengagement, slumped in their chairs, crossed their hands, checked their phones or computers... I have no such feedback with everyone joining remotely these days. Furthermore, I have a sense our calls on average include more people these days, and I wonder if there is data to confirm or deny this hypothesis.
So, why do I care?
For once, these calls cost companies a lot of money. Usually they include attendees who are smart and well paid, and their time is valuable for the company.
Equally important, but less obvious, I think this practice is obscuring another important set of issues.
While attending these large calls creates a sense of collaboration, signals cultural conformance and seems to foster improved information exchange, in reality most attendees are simply multi-tasking. On the outside this looks like our productivity goes up. We attend more calls, while answering more emails and developing more documents, presentations, reports, quotes, code, etc. In practice, we get overworked, stressed and the quality of our work suffers.
I want to go back in time and only attend calls where everyone pays 100% attention and decisions are made. Everything else I would rather read subject to my time availability, and if I don't have capacity to process more information, I will not pretend I can handle this by attending the call with muted mic and webcam off.
What do you think?
