Hi folks,
As I type this, I’m sitting on a Zoom call as my CEO conducts a “Town Meeting”. Several things have struck me during the first 15 minutes of this call:
- There are 140 people on this call, and the video and audio are flawless.
- Our IT & Cyber Security teams were called out for their respective fantastic support of our entire company working remotely.
- We’ve been working entirely from home/remotely for 15 weeks today.
- Even the CEO has given up “dressing professionally” at this point, even he’s in t-shirt and shorts.
- We’re a software company of ~200 people, and in 15 weeks have collectively held 13,771 Zoom meetings in those 15 weeks.
I’ve been in high-tech my entire life. I’ve had the ability to work from home for over 25 years now, and often have. But even the most progressive, small start-up companies were reluctant to hire entirely remote people, and had wfh policies that often limited people to one or two days/week at most.
But all that has changed. As our CEO has pointed out, we are MORE productive than we’ve ever been. We’ve completely adapted to wfh. After 15 weeks its clear the office political BS that blocked wfh in the past was just that, office politics! We can, and do work remotely very, very well.
What’s my point, and how does it relate to our companies? Simple. We’re not going to go backwards. We couldn’t do what we’re doing across an entire company without Zoom. Zoom is here NOW. It wasn’t 10 years ago, or really even 5 years ago. But it’s here now. And we’re using the crap out of it! I’m a developer who spends 99% of my time in the cloud. And yet, I average 3-5 Zoom meetings/day! My CEO and the management team average significantly more than that. Sales folks, probably ALL DAY/EVERY DAY on Zoom.
We’re just one small company. And yet, all my friends in this area work at similar types of small, high-tech companies who live “in the cloud”. So multiply that ~14000 meetings across every other company like mine. Then expand that number for companies larger. That’s where I see Zoom going. Just getting bigger and bigger.
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Paul - who apologizes if this “boots-on-the-ground perspective” is OT or lacks anything but a “gut feel”. Please delete if necessary.