Zoom, the videoconferencing platform that profited substantially from remote work during the pandemic, is now asking employees to return to the office. Its CEO, Eric Yuan, claims Zoom meetings don’t let people build trust or be innovative.
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Yuan explained that trust is essential “for everything,” and he finds it hard to build not only that but also innovation and debates over Zoom.
“Quite often, you come up with great ideas, but when we are all on Zoom, it’s really hard,” Yuan said, according to Insider. “We cannot have a great conversation. We cannot debate each other well because everyone tends to be very friendly when you join a Zoom call.”
For me it’s like this, I have a useful point to add to the conversation but when I interject the lag is juuuuust long enough that it ends up I’m talking over the next person.
So when I lead a meeting with zoom participants I either force dead air to allow the remote people to jump in, or I eat as much dead air as possible to lock them out of the conversation. depending on my own agenda.
incidentally this problem doesn’t exist in asynchronous collaboration methods. but zoom and it’s like win out on shear informwtion bandwidth.
The current video conferencing and remote working systems are indeed amazing feats of technology and social acceptance, but we still need to work on it. a lot.
I’m definitely not pretending Zoom is perfect. It has issues. Not enough issues to make a return to office worthwhile for those who function far better from home, but issues.
I just think that if there’s one person who has a huge state in pretending it is perfect, it should be this guy. And the most baffling part is that the issues he’s making up are rooted in human behavior that would still be present in an office setting (like being too nice to avoid HR), not his tech.