Well as someone who has been involved in international meetings for years I have to disagree.Micro The Maniac wrote: ↑Fri Oct 16, 2020 13:03
Following you off on this tangent, what CoVid has shown is what many of us have suggested - virtual meetings are MUCH LESS EFFICIENT than face-to-face. Especially where discussion as opposed to mere presentations are required. And virtual meetings are shown to be problematic for non-English speakers (when typically, English is the "International" language).
At least when people are in a meeting room, away from the office, they are focussed on the meeting, and not at the beck and call of other distractions.
And that is before taking into account problems with time-zones. eg suggestions please as to the best time of day (UTC) to hold a meeting involving UK (UTC/UTC+1), Japan (UTC+9) and California (UTC-8/UTC-7) ???
I had two on Friday
The first was a weekly ISO 15926 working group meeting with attendees from the Netherlands, Norway , USA, Germany, Sweden and Finland. This has been running for several years and there is no way on earth this could be done face to face.
The second was with an oil and gas consortium based in the USA, this really is a globe spanner as we do have a attendees from every continent except Antarctica. The organiser is in the USA, technical support comes from the University of Western Australia and other working groups in Pune India, Brazil, Alberta, New Orleans, Quebec, South Africa and Pennsylvania. The worst of this one is we vary the times to share the pain and yes it does sometimes mean a 2 AM meeting. That said its better than the jet lag from flying to Calgary for a 3 hour meeting. I would hate to think how many cities I visited and hardly saw more of than the airport, hotel and office. Then there were the long road trips to Oxford, Warrington, London etc. I do miss the Eurostar trips to Paris and the little hotel in Les Halles.
Face to face meetings are full of distractions not to mention little huddles forming passing notes to each other. What is said has to be face to face. Better yet when questions are asked anyone can take over as lead and share their desktop.
Now there are things better done face to face in small groups, specifically training. I did make long trips to hold one or two week training courses but thats the exception. My last employer before I retired was a Pennsylvania based software company where virtual meeting where the norm as 50% of employees including the CEO worked from home, my boss worked in Marlyland and the group I managed was split between Pakistan, India, Canada and the UK.
Working from home does have potential distraction but that is all about setting expectations , usually along the lines of 'when daddy is in his office with the door closed let him alone. Admittedly one colleague had to put his office in a shed in the corner of the garden but most of us hacked it OK.
Caveat - the company I worked for DID recognise the issues and provided office furniture, a top end laptop, large screen monitor, printer and paid for a professional internet connection. That said they were happy with the deal as it meant they could close the Cambridge Office and save a bundle. Of the people nominally working from Cambridge one actually lived in Aberystwyth.