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by fdye 1129 days ago
I'll try to give sort of another analogy. With everyone at home on an individual laptop there is essentially one channel of communication. A single audio and video channel showing the presentation, or someones face talking, or whatever. The entire group is focusing all attention and communication in the same place, sure some may be zoning out, but its consistent. Now take the example of a room of six people, a whiteboard, and two remote. We essentially have two or more communications channel for those in the room together, and a single channel for everyone on zoom. Sure they can see a birds eye of people sitting in chairs around a table, maybe the camera focuses to varying crap degrees on who's talking. The whiteboard may be a camera focused on it, or one of those magic board thingies (again just use lucidchart or something over zoom, its better). There are cross-conversations, or mannerisms, conversations are likely muffled or speaking over each other, its generally very poor for those not in the room.

I don't think we're actually disagreeing, I agree if you can get everyone in a room then cool, its likely better. However, in terms of RTO, if you are a large F500 company you should look at your employees day-to-day and calendars. If the bulk of them are zoom meetings with people in other locations (different buildings, floors, etc) where it is unlikely they will be able to all get in the same physical location, then the axiom holds and you should just let them take it from home.

1 comments

Yes I think we are saying the same thing. However I thought you said that, „companies with hybrid setup do not work, so all should be on-site“.

I‘d love to find exactly this where people commit let’s say 1x-2x a month where we meet onsite for these discussions where we need physical presence. And the rest of the time is done via async communication, notion, written notes and adhoc meetings (few recurring ones).