Can You Hear Me

by Nick Morgan

  Audioconferences can work, as

  this case study shows

  Given all the difficulties inherent in the medium of the conference call, can you base the success of a company on it? More and more often these days, teams include people who work Chapter_07.indd 160

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  remotely, spread out around the country or even around the world. But aviation consulting firm SimpliFlying has taken this new style of work to the extreme.6 There are nine people at this small firm, and they’re based in Singapore, India, Spain, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The company’s headquarters are in Singapore, but the CEO is based in Canada and the team is entirely remote. “Everyone works from home,” says Shashank Nigam, the CEO, “so we had to reinvent the way we do business.” The conference call still has an essential role to play. But first, let’s examine a little more how the company works virtually.

  SimpliFlying doesn’t function like a typical company.

  Employees can work whenever they want; there are no fixed hours. One of the consultants in Singapore is a night owl who likes to work at 2 a.m. Another consultant, based in Spain, makes time every evening to go out to dinner with friends. Most of the team members have been with the company for years, so they’ve come to understand how their colleagues like to work and when they’ll typically be available. But the model allows for total flexibility. One of the Singapore-based consultants worked from Thailand for a week once. “She went to Thailand and lived in a treehouse for a week,” Nigam says, “and all she needed was internet and she was able to do her work fine.”

  There are benefits to working on such a flexible, global team.

  “We are spread across every single time zone there is,” Nigam says.

  That means they work on twenty-four-hour cycles. Singapore can start working on something, hand the project over to India when the Singapore workday is over, and then India can hand the work over to Europe. If Singapore starts work on a document during its workday, by the time Nigam is awake in Canada, the document has been through two drafts and is ready for him to review.

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  162 Specific Techniques for Specific Digital Channels SimpliFlying accepts the good,

  the bad, and the beautiful

  Of course, there are also significant challenges to being so spread out. “I have to be cognizant of the fact that my Europeans will go off to bed by the time it’s noon here in Canada,” Nigam says. The team players have very limited time available for real-time communication as a team—and of course, none of their communication happens face-to-face.

  Under these circumstances, “there’s no such thing as brainstorming,” Nigam says. It’s just impossible to get the dynamic of people sitting around a whiteboard and sharing ideas if you’re not in the same space.

  SimpliFlying has taken an experimental approach to the challenges of working on an all-remote team. Some of the solutions are simple. For example, the company assigns two project managers to every client, so that there’s always someone available, no matter where the client is based. Some solutions require more effort. The team meets up for in-person retreats three or four times a year. They’ll typically rent an Airbnb accommodation and spend time doing the brainstorming they can’t do on a conference call, as well as just spending time together, making up for all the watercooler chat they miss out on as a remote team.

  And then there are the conference calls. Working on a remote team involves a lot of conference calls. That’s a necessity. “Because we have very little face-to-face interaction in which all of us are together, we have daily stand-up calls,”

  Nigam says. A daily meeting might seem like overkill for a traditional team, but for a remote team, it’s crucial. “In a remote team, one of the most important things is to overcom-Chapter_07.indd 162

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  municate,” Nigam says. “Unless we overcommunicate, things always slip between the cracks.”

  SimpliFlying does calls—but it

  does them differently

  SimpliFlying’s daily conference calls are designed to be more bearable than your typical conference call. First, they’re strictly limited to ten to fifteen minutes. “It’s very structured,”

  Nigam says. “We will share what we’ve been up to in the last twenty-four hours, what we’ll be up to in the next twenty-four hours, and what we need help on.” With a team of nine people and at most fifteen minutes to talk, that means each update is just a minute or two. Everyone is forced to be clear and concise. “If we don’t put a structure in place, people tend to ramble on,” Nigam says. “We want to ensure that everyone has a chance to speak.”

  The daily stand-up meetings are “the backbone of our interaction,” Nigam says. They’re strictly focused on deadlines and key reminders for the rest of the team. “What we take off the call are any detailed discussions on project documents or client progress,” he explains. Any more in-depth conversations are handled one-on-one or in small groups.

  The SimpliFlying team has strict rules for one-on-one and small group calls as well. “No meeting can be longer than forty minutes,” Nigam says. This rule started out as a limitation of Zoom, the software Nigam’s group uses for video calls—

  Zoom’s free product limits calls to forty minutes. But the external limitation soon became a huge benefit. “Hey, guess what,” Nigam says. “If people only have forty minutes, they cut out the fluff and focus on what’s most important.” It’s tough Chapter_07.indd 163

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  164 Specific Techniques for Specific Digital Channels to concentrate on long calls, so SimpliFlying has eliminated them. The company enforces the same rules, very successfully, for client calls.

  Time-limiting all meetings does mean that there’s no time to waste. “When you are face-to-face, you can talk about the weather,” Nigam says. “When you are on the phone, you don’t talk about the weather. You cut to the chase.” That’s one reason why the regular staff retreats are so helpful—the team can get straight to business in their meetings because they’ve had plenty of chances to build relationships in person.

  Both virtual and in-person

  interaction is important

  The frequent phone calls and video calls require the team to be flexible and understanding with each other. “I’ll be the first to admit, I do have two very young daughters, and I do work from home,” Nigam says. “There have been times when my daughters have walked into my meeting.” It helps that the team knows that he’s working from home—and he’s not trying to hide that fact.

  “I do the opposite of the BBC professor,” he says. The professor’s interview on BBC went viral when his kids came into the room where he was doing the interview remotely. Instead of trying to shoo the kids away, as the professor did, Nigam will take them onto his lap and have them say hi. Acknowledging the interruption works better than trying to pretend it isn’t happening.

  “All of these rules together have worked quite well for us,”

  Nigam says. And the team is still open to experimenting. The mandatory vacation policy has only been around for a year, and the “deep work” Fridays are just a couple of months old. Making a global, 24-7 team work is a challenge, but SimpliFlying is determined to make it work.

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  Practical fix

  The audioconference cheat sheet

  • Put some life into your voice. Smile when you talk.

  • Put someone else in charge.

  • Put a limit on the formal remarks; make the audioconference as interactive as possible.

  • Add an advocate on your side for the other side if there are two sides.

  • Circulate an agenda in advance and appoint someone to take notes and send them out to all parties afterward.

 
• Take on or appoint the role of active listener. This person should report back to the group often.

  • Rethink how long the meeting should go.

  • Set aside time when no one is allowed to do anything except socialize.

  • Assign each person to do a thirty-second video or report of some kind on some social topic.

  • Poll the entire group when making decisions that affect everyone.

  • Make visible and actual any rules, customs, or courtesies that are typically left invisible in a face-to-face setting.

  • Establish a group activity with both virtual and physical aspects.

  • Combine the virtual and the real for greatest effectiveness.

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  • Instead of a talk, make it an interview.

  • Be clear and present about the logistics, timing, and duration of the meeting.

  • Use emotion-laden words when you’re trying to communicate something important.

  • Be aware of your power and position, and use both appropriately.

  CHAPTER SUMMARY

  • There are three kinds of conference calls; vary your approach accordingly.

  • Keep public calls short, and appoint an MC.

  • Keep team and client calls on track, and strive for balance.

  • Keep weekly update calls focused, and avoid chitchat.

  • Vary the format and the participants.

  • Become aware of the relationship between power and influence on the call.

  • One company, SimpliFlying, provides an innovative model for making conference calls effective.

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  8.

  THE WEBINAR

  When Steve Jobs first presented the iPhone to the world, he said it was revolutionary. He was both right and wrong. He was right in that the iPhone has changed our lives in more ways than just about any other device introduced in my lifetime and yours, but he was wrong in a crucial way: he didn’t understand what it was for, at least completely. He introduced it as a combination of already existing things—the phone, the iPod, and a browser. He was only right about one of those three.

  The way people use the iPhone (and other smartphones) is indeed primarily as a browser—the last function on Jobs’s list.

  According to recent research by Pew, eight in ten Americans own a smartphone, and 93 percent of them use it to access the internet at least weekly.1 The pattern is similar around the world.

  That means that an extraordinary half of all internet use is now taking place on mobile phones.

  But the next two most common things to do on your cell phone are to take videos and pictures (seven in ten do so weekly) and to text (two-thirds do so weekly).

  Jobs can be forgiven for thinking like most of humanity about his revolutionary device. Most of us imagine that the future will be an extension of the past. We can make guesses, to be sure, about flying cars and teleporting, but we miss the Chapter_08.indd 167

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  168 Specific Techniques for Specific Digital Channels real transformation that inventions like the iPhone create, because it is so hard to imagine real change.

  Information is not as asymmetrical

  as it used to be

  Before the mobile phone, checking up on people was sometimes difficult. The question “What’s happening to so-and-so?” used to be potentially fraught with great meaning and misery. Today, the most common response to the question is, “I don’t know; shoot her a text.”

  We use Jobs’s invention to allow us to connect in new and interesting ways with our friends, family, acquaintances, business colleagues, customers, and others. The most basic human need is being sati-

  sfied by the communication device we now can carry in our pockets and operate anywhere with a thumb or another finger or two.

  Here’s the essential point: mobile devices enable overwhelmingly one-to-one or one-to-several communication. Sometimes it’s a shout-out to your whole tribe, but most of the time, it’s one-to-one or one person to a handful. We rarely use these devices for one-to-many communication. Why? We don’t favor it unless we’ve elevated the person doling out the communication to a high level. We don’t mind being in the audience if the speaker is a famous actor or politician. But if we’ve never heard of the person, the appeal is minimal.

  Let’s examine this truly awful

  way to communicate

  Add to these disadvantages the colder, less emotional digital forms of one-to-many communications, and you have a truly awful way to communicate.

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  That’s the webinar.

  Webinars, for most people, are a form of torture. Participants sign up because of some interest in the topic or the speaker, but quickly find that the information is sparse and the selling component heavy. Or the speaker is terrible and the slides worse and it’s just impossible to get much from the hour despite your best intentions.

  I give webinars a separate chapter because they’re so awful.

  Even though the technology is similar to the conference call, the webinar is worse. Why? It’s not a conversation, like something you can have with someone you love on your mobile phone via voice, text, or pictures. The webinar is simply a disembodied voice from a relative stranger, emotions stripped out, leaking out of a computer or phone. Or worse—a computer phone.

  What makes a speaker memorable is emotion—literally, since memory works through emotion. Put even a great speaker on a webinar, and most of the emotion is stripped out by the bandwidth reduction of the technology. The result? Boredom. Nails-in-the-forehead boredom. Jump-off-a-bridge boredom.

  Add video, and curiously, things don’t get much better. It’s time for some tough love on running effective, engaging webinars, whether the picture is there or not. (I’ll talk in more detail about video conversations in the next chapter.) We have too many meetings and

  way too many webinars

  In-person meetings are the bane of the working world. Most managers complain that they have to attend far too many meetings with way too little purpose. And yet we can’t get along without them.

  What are their primary faults? Why do we hate them so much? They don’t start on time, there is no agenda, or the Chapter_08.indd 169

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  170 Specific Techniques for Specific Digital Channels one that has been presented isn’t followed anyway. No one documents the results, if there are any, and there’s often no follow-up. Add mobile phones to the mix, and half the group is only half present, regularly sneaking semi-surreptitious glances at their phones in a desperate attempt to keep up with the steady stream of additions to their to-do lists.

  But at least they’re all sitting in the same room. As readers will be aware of by now, even if the participants aren’t looking at each other, they are exchanging emotion, intent, attitude, and decisions through their unconscious minds. A virtual meeting robs the participants of that rich and important source of emotion, information, and connection.

  A one-to-many webinar is even worse, because you have less reason to engage in the first place. Your unconscious never gets anything interesting or important from the deracinated voice on the speakerphone or in your earbuds, your emotions are left out of the event, and all the senses except the auditory are effectively put into storage for the duration. In the end, then, a webinar takes everything potentially bad about face-to-face meetings, doubles down on these things, and adds a few more truly crucial soul-destroying challenges to the mix for good measure.

  Here’s a possible solution: don’t do them.

  “But wait,” you say. “We couldn’t possibly communicate with the large numbers of people we reach, in the personal, live way that we do, without webinars. You’re being foolish. We would be s
tupid to stop doing them. And they’re almost free!”

  A radical suggestion: don’t do webinars

  With that last imagined argument, you’ve hit on the real reason that people do webinars. They’re a cheap form of meeting. No one has to leave home or the office. No one has to commit to Chapter_08.indd 170

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  the experience—people can drop off if the webinar doesn’t grab them. Heck, attendees don’t even have to get dressed if they don’t want to.

  On the internet, no one knows you’re wearing pajamas.

  We humans crave collaborative experiences, but there are simply too many obstacles in the way of a webinar for it to have much of a chance of becoming a collaborative experience. So how can you take this miserable form of communications—one that violates almost everything that’s important about the attributes of good communications that people need for them to be successful—and make it work? Following are several suggestions for making webinars better. Don’t say you didn’t know—

  henceforth. There is no plausible deniability where webinars are concerned.

  First of all, practice good online meeting hygiene Good organizational structure of the webinar can show the attendees that you take their time seriously. The following practices are good ways to show people that you value them and have set high expectations for the webinar.

  Start on time. This recommendation sounds obvious, and it should be, but I’ve participated in a number of webinars that were run by good companies but that didn’t start on time because people are still signing in at five minutes past—and ten minutes past. To start on time, you need to begin the tech setup thirty minutes beforehand and then be ready to be ruthless when the hour comes. Just start, and don’t try to catch people up by repeating, starting again, and so on. Catch-up like this penalizes the people who did start on time. And it creates an awful herky-jerky opening: “Oh, I hear someone else has joined.

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  172 Specific Techniques for Specific Digital Channels Where are you from? Who is that? Let’s get started. Oh, there’s someone else . . .”