Most Zoom Calls are a Waste of Time

It took a global pandemic for organisations to finally embrace remote work at scale.

This forced experiment is in many respects a long overdue one.

I recall being a senior consultant at Ernst & Young in 2011, and thinking to myself that I could have been working remotely much of the time.

A decade ago, we had remote-access VPN with two-factor authentication to log in to our team’s shared files, email and our IM platform. We could get stuff done from virtually anywhere.

But while the capability was there, company culture was, and continued to lag far behind until COVID-19 reared its ugly head.

Different Workplace, Same Bad Habits

Today, Twitter feeds are populated with giddy professionals taking 10-person team selfies to celebrate a new way of work.

But as I wrote in The Five Levels of Remote Work, most teams are at what Automattic founder, Matt Mullenweg, calls Level 2 —they’re simply recreating the office, online.

Level 2 remote work is characterized by many of the bad habits that permeate the modern office, sabotaging productivity in the process. Yes, we have access to tools like Zoom — fast becoming a synonym for video-calls — but it’s what we do with those tools that matters.