Post-Covid Workplace

As some countries are lifting their lockdowns and there’s talk of re-opening workplaces, a recurring theme has been how “things will not be the same”. There’s a belief that everything has changed, that people were forced to work remotely, and that has changed how employers view remote work.

While I think that is all true, one aspect that I think people have forgotten is the question why was there all the skepticism of remote work in the first place? I remember an episode of The Good Wife, where a remote worker had tried to establish her physical presence in the office via a Segway-iPad and ended up getting ignored, and also intentionally left out of certain discussions. It was quite funny: one scene had a co-worker intentionally pasting a paper sheet on the Ipad (as a somewhat mean prank), which caused the telepresence robot to bump all over the place.

But the problem of how do you seamlessly connect remote co-workers with physically-present co-workers will still remain, even after Covid. As it is, it’s a huge challenge to get attention in remote meetings: the existing interactions are really problematic, because the intuition is to raise your hand to get attention and not to press a button. (My classmate Davi has written about this, and also created a few pretty cool machine-learning prototypes.) This challenge is even greater when there are both remote AND physically-present meeting attendees: my experience has been that the remote folks tend to be completely overlooked in the heat of discussions.

So how could we improve the interaction between remove and physical meeting participants on remote meeting platforms?

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Feedback or comments?

*Updated date 17 May 20*