Zoom is Awesome - Zoom Sucks

Sabre MD Talan Miller shares his thoughts on the Zoom / Teams delivery dilemma.

For those of us still delivering many workshops in the virtual world there is a love / hate relationship with our online time.

In one sense our ‘frenemy’ Zoom (or Teams if that’s your platform) have been lifesavers for team interaction during pandemic lockdowns. Yet, from a deeper perspective the contrived and screen-based medium can also inflict its own new dysfunctions into working relationships. This needs to be carefully managed.

As grateful as we are for this great alternative to complete hibernation, we must also be cautious of the damage that can be done to working relationship and team health from 'Zoom Fatigue'.

To cut a long story short, we embrace the Zoom and Teams platforms, but only for those formats that we know will add value and work well, not just add to Zoom fatigue for the sake of another sale.

Myriad well-researched and well-articulated factors now point to the way the human brain works and how technology simply cannot replicate the chemistry of a live meeting. It can in fact, cause misunderstandings and subconscious fracture in virtual and hybrid teams. Much of this research looks at the neuroscience of how we interpret verbal and non-verbal signals. Sessions must therefore be meaningful and as short as possible.

When the pandemic first hit us all we shared that collective ‘oh shit!’ moment as Team Building in its classic ‘in-person’ sense came to an immediate halt.

Our business looked at many possible online activity options, and for our part, we decided to mostly hibernate the team building activity side of things with some dignity rather than debase 30 years of hard-won credibility. Now that may sound a little extreme, but when we were honest about it, some things just don’t make a quality leap into the virtual world. Team building activities are almost without exception in that category no matter how slick they may look.

We are therefore, happy to keep the bulk of team-based activities on the shelf until a client has the chance for in-person events rather than hammer square live event pegs into round virtual holes.

Whilst we continue with face-to-face events in some States with our clients, and these are of course far superior to the virtual options, many are stuck with virtual and hybrid teams for a while yet. We make sure that what we offer will do more good than harm.

Thus our most highly recommended online formats for online and virtual teams remains: