Who's Zooming who?

Without doubt the story of last week had nothing to do with COVID-19, for once, but was about a Zoom call that went viral. By Friday evening, everyone had heard of Jackie Weaver, the heroic chief officer of the Cheshire Association of Local Councils, who had presided over a meeting of Handforth Parish Council and ended up thwarting an attempted coup d'état. 

The chaotic session - which took place in December - found itself onto social media last week, and before you knew it, was being replayed every hour on Sky News and the BBC's rolling news channel, and even found itself on the world stage via CNN. Sitcom writers burst forth to say that the Handforth meeting was more comical than anything they could have devised. Even Reece Sheersmith, who created The League of Gentlemen and its hilariously surreal depiction of life in the fictional northern town of Royston Vasey, and on which you could easily have thought the stroppy burghers of Handforth were based. But, by yesterday, more tales had emerged of similarly dysfunctional public assemblies taking place on Zoom, which struck me as significant - not the fact that local administration is chaotic or being conducted online, but the prominence of the meeting platform itself: Zoom. 

In less than a decade Zoom has gone from a typical Silicon Valley startup to the de facto generic noun for online meetings, supplanting Skype and Apple’s FaceTime in the process - and pretty much in just this last year. To the chagrin of Microsoft and its Teams application and Cisco’s WebEx, everything is now “a Zoom call”. I had never heard of the platform until a couple of years ago, when the PR agency I was working with at my last company recommended that we switch to it from the company-mandated WebEx. It wasn’t entirely clear what the USP was, but it seemed more reliable as well as less rigid for participants at multiple companies and their own unique IT environments.

Picture: Zoom

It is clear, though, that throughout the last year of lockdown that the company founded by former Cisco engineering executive Eric Yuan (pictured right) in 2011 has come into its own. So much so that easily the smartest career move I’ve ever seen is that of a former colleague who joined Zoom last April as a international marketeer, just as the company's usage was going nuclear. 

By last spring, everyone and everything seemed to be taking place via Zoom. Even the business of government during the COVID-19 crisis, when Boris Johnson - confined to quarters by his own bout of the virus - was seen to hold a crucial meeting, during which the Zoom meeting ID was clearly visible. This prompted inevitable questions about the platform's security: to some, it came as a surprise that Her Majesty’s Government was, effectively, using the same app as families doing quiz nights and birthday drinks. This wasn’t the only occurrence of concerns about Zoom’s privacy, with the emergence of ‘Zoombombing’, whereby it was discovered that nefarious scrotes could hack into a Zoom meeting and bother it with explicit images. This was on top of more innocent Zoombombs when barely clothed flatmates accidentally walked through kitchens, along with children bouncing into meetings and cats leaping in front of webcams.

There is no doubt that Zoom, more than any other video communications platform before, has played an unprecedented role in creating a new and strange normality over the last year, taking the place of restaurants, pubs, living rooms and kitchen dining tables in enabling some form of social life, as well as keeping the business meeting culture going. It has played host to school lessons, church services, stag parties and blind dates. Even Britain’s Houses of Parliament have adopted a Zoom-based technology to facilitate business in the Commons, enabling up to 120 MPs to join any particular session while only 50 are allowed to be physically present in the chamber due to social distancing measures. Italy’s biggest ever mafia trial - the mass prosecution of 355 Calabrian ’NDrangheta suspects - is currently being conducted in a special courtroom in Lamezia Terme, with defendants in jails dotted across the country facing their accusers via Zoom.

Thanks to Zoom and its rivals we have all, in the last year, spent more time in strangers’ houses than ever before. I joined my current company in April and have only ever spent time with my new colleagues via laptop's webcam. And, yet, I know what my colleagues’ kitchens look like, their bedrooms even and what books they read (or purport to read, given the craze of artfully arranging bookshelves to showcase one’s literary tastes). We’ve even succumbed to insecurities about what we look like on Zoom: working from home used to mean rolling out of bed and sitting at the kitchen table in pyjamas and the first T-shirt that came to hand, until people realised that a meeting on Zoom placed dress code under even greater scrutiny than if you were actually in the office. 

This has led to fashion and beauty magazines running vacuous features about the perils of spending so much time on video calls. Ofcom has estimated that since the pandemic began we're spending 40% of our working weeks in online meetings. ‘Zoom face’ is, apparently, a thing, that we're now hyper-conscious of how we look down the barrel of a webcam, and that having it look up your nostrils and displaying the contents at the other end on a high-definition stream may not be the most attractive thing in the world. Scientists working for Unilever has even claimed that the blue light emitted by laptop screens is putting us at UV risk, and that five working days a week spent on video calls has the same impact on our skin as as 25 unprotected minutes in the midday sun. There are, too, more physical debilitations from the constant round of video conferences that now, as spines grow weary from being hunched over laptops on home furniture that wasn’t designed for nine-hour working days, and eyes that have become sore and tired from LED screens.

Our pain is Zoom’s gain. As the pandemic took hold last spring, daily downloads of the app increased by 30-times, year-on-year. Zoom became the United States’ most downloaded iPhone app for much of 2020. Recent figures put daily usage at some 350 million - up from just 10 million at Christmas 2019. Every financial quarter since the coronavirus emerged, the company has seen its quarterly revenue grow by enormous orders of magnitude as much, at one point, as 355% in a year. The explosion in use even appeared to catch the San Jose, California-based company by surprise, with its international head of partner marketing, Derek Pando, telling advertising industry magazine The Drum that it was, early on, like being in “a war room”. “We didn't know where it was going next and we didn't know how bad it was going to be. We were constantly trying to shift our resources to try to support people that were using and relying on Zoom,” he said.

The big shift for Zoom was its breakout from being just a rival to business communications apps like Webex and Skype. Until COVID-19 hit, most Zoom users were businesses and, even if home users had experience of using Zoom at work, it meant learning-as-you-go for families. Grannies, aunts, uncles and teenagers alike all had to quickly learn Zoom etiquette and dealing with Internet latency and not all talking at once. Everyone become their own television director, learning the simple art of framing to avoid the alarming sight of someone’s enormous, looming forehead. There was also the lesson - sometimes learned painfully - of knowing when to have the microphone on and when to have it off, not just to preserve bandwidth, but also to save fellow participants from the sound effects human bodies generate of their own volition.

Zoom has arguably been the technology success story of the pandemic. But as vaccine programmes start to take effect, questions are inevitably being raised as to how it will fare when things return to some form of normality (it's share price even took a hit when the Pfizer jab was announced in November). The company is hopeful that remote working will remain in place, continuing to prove a boon to corporate use. Certainly at this stage it’s still unclear just how and when business life will return to in-office working - even if it ever will. Office workers will, I’m sure, be eager to get back to their previous routines, even the arduous urban commutes. along with the social aspects of being in the same workspace as others. What’s not known, however, is just what measures companies will have to put in place, all the while COVID-19 is still out there, and 100% vaccination has not been achieved. One likelihood is that a hybrid model will be adopted. Home life, on the other hand, will be different. Hardly anyone you or I know is exactly happy about being barred from seeing loved ones and friends in the flesh, but with the virus showing signs of being countered by vaccines and lockdowns, and with the days already starting to grow longer, you get the sense that it won’t be long before we can step out from behind the webcam and see people in the flesh, even touch them.

Realistically, the biggest threat to Zoom’s future will be from the companies that it managed to eclipse in a record space of time. Microsoft, Cisco, Google and even Facebook have not stood still when it comes innovating their own video platforms, and will not have been best pleased by the ten-year-old upstart stealing their thunder. Microsoft, in particular, stands to benefit more than others, given the ubiquity of its Office software and packages like Word and Powerpoint, and the corporate licences that companies buy to provide employees with the complete suite, which also includes Teams. All of Zoom's rivals have added new features, such as background noise cancellation to make working from a crowded home that much less perilous. Teams even added ’Together Mode’, designed to give multiple users the sense of all sitting in the same environment, though in reality it makes a group of colleagues look more like participants in the opening title sequence of The Muppet Show. Time will tell, then, whether the innovation arms race in video conferencing will continue to be as vital, as the world gets back to normal. 

Other workplace collaboration tools with video calling, like Slack (which has just been acquired by Salesforce) are also gaining ground, and its likely that all the players in this market will have also reached peak usage over the last year, limiting further growth. Zoom will have heard these arguments before, and will argue that it already successfully penetrated a crowded market when it launched in 2011. It’s just that the coronavirus has given it an unprecedented bump.

Picture: Zoom

We may - thankfully - be soon seeing the back of quiz nights and laptop dinner parties, but in the business world there’s enough uncertainty about future working practices that it’s fair to say that Zoom and its rivals are here to stay. And until computing intelligence develops to such an advanced degree that software will be able to detect when a call participant is about to speak, we will still be hearing the words “You’re on mute!” for a long time to come.

Are we ready to return to the office?

Picture: BBC

It is now six weeks since the UK went into lockdown and from a working perspective, everything is going well. On Thursday I’ll celebrate the first full month in my new job, one in which I have so far met only three colleagues in person - one, a few years ago, and my boss and his boss during my interview in February. Now I think of it, they were probably the last non-family members I had any real proximity to before everything came to a halt (delivery drivers dropping food at the front door, and the neighbours across the road clapping on a Thursday night don't count).

Since I came on onboard at the company everything has been done virtually, from my induction to the ramp-up of tasks and projects with my various internal “stakeholders”. As you can imagine, working for one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies, the IT has worked perfectly. The Skype calls, even when subject to the vagaries of home broadband (from another supplier, I have to confess) have proven almost as good as being in the same room as colleagues, and even though you don’t have to see the whites of their eyes - face facts, a good old phone call is just as good - it is strangely reassuring to see co-workers in their home habitats, like everyone else ignoring workplace dress codes and not worrying (too much) about hair roots showing.

This has raised the inevitable question: will we ever need to return to the office? In one of my former companies, working out of one of a select number of ‘hub’ locations for at least three days a week was deemed mandatory. In another, an incoming CFO once told me that the policy of proactively encouraging remote working in the firm’s vast and extremely spaced out US workforce (done partly to save costs and partly to encourage more socially sustainable working) might have to be reversed, and we should return to everyone working in the same place. For colleagues based out of homes as diversely remote as rural Massachusetts, the Nevada desert and, I believe, a part of Oregon that barely had electricity, this was clearly going to be a step too far. As word spread of a possible return to centralised working, CVs became refreshed rather sharpish. Now, anyone lucky enough to have an office job (or, indeed, still have a job), has been told to work from home. So, should it stay that way?

For a start, social distancing and the lockdown have probably been a minor boon to corporate balance sheets, as the overheads of running office spaces have shifted to their homeworking employees, who are still paying for their normal household broadband and their utilities. A story in The Times on Saturday reported that Her Majesty’s Taxperson had seen a spike in homeworkers claiming tax relief on things like office chairs and printer ink, personal costs they’re now having to bear that would have otherwise been met by employers. As someone who, now, sits at a kitchen table on a vintage wooden chair which, while exceedingly characterful, is about as comfortable as an 11th century village church pew, the thought of ordering one of those nice, springy ‘David Brent’ chairs does sound like music to my benumbed rump, especially if I could claim 20% of the cost back.

Picture: Microsoft

If, then, it’s been proven so easy to have the corporate workforce work from their kitchens, living rooms and home offices, the old concept of hundreds of people amassed across the floors of corporate campuses seems strange to go back to. There are still cultural advantages to everyone working under the same roof, but the apparent success with which some sections of the workforce have switched to homeworking calls into acute question what long-term need there will be for great sheds full of desks. That, though being openly debated in the media, is still for the long-term. The noises coming out of yesterday's No.10 press conference were quite clear, that any easing of the lockdown won't happen soon as the government's five-point criteria for easing seem unlikely to be met, all the while the risk of a second and worse peak of COVID-19 is high. Despite this, a partial return to office working is being considered by the government, with defence secretary Ben Wallace this morning telling Sky News that there are "options".

Boris Johnson’s frankly remarkable recovery from the virus has no doubt injected some new vim into the Government’s plan for getting Britain back to work and restarting the economy. One theory is that any easing of lockdown might first allow construction workers back to building sites (though how two-metre social distancing would be maintained there remains to be seen). And then there are offices. The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy is believed to be looking at a number of proposals for the limited reopening of offices, including a ban on ‘hot desking’, canteens remaining shut, strict rules on communal spaces, and desks and workstations spread out to a minimum two-metre distance (adding another half a metre to the current average separation). There is even talk of a ban on pens being shared by coworkers.

But, then, how do you move several thousand people about office buildings? Who would be brave enough to press the lift buttons, let alone share a lift safely with others all trying to get to their desks for the requisite start time? Most office lifts I've been in at clocking-on time have been stuffed to the gills (and there's always one individual who has to squeeze on just as the doors are closing). Some have suggested staggered working even over seven days, rather than five, with shift systems enabling different employees in on alternating days. That might sound practical, but what would it actually achieve? And, still, for those people who have been instructed not to leave the house for 12 weeks “at least” due to health conditions, a return to the office may not be on the cards at all: it has been suggested that the government and its health and scientific advisers think that the most at-risk in society will have to remain in lockdown for up to a year, or however long it takes to produce a viable vaccine.

Even if we could go back to the office would we want to? A YouGov poll for The Sunday Times yesterday revealed that just 25% of adults felt safe about returning to work, a figure compounded by the continued opposition by a sizeable percentage of the nation to schools returning to normal. This would impact those who, even if they could wouldn’t be able to return to work while supervising home schooling. And, then, even if people were OK about going back, how would they get there? The insane scenes of overcrowded Tube trains in the early weeks of the crisis, as Tube services were cut but demand remained high, will weigh heavily on the minds of anyone remotely paranoid about claustrophobia brought on by the contagion.

For the foreseeable future, then, many offices will remain empty or at least sparse. This, the Financial Times discussed last week, will lead to corporate finance chiefs looking at their own bricks and mortar, glass and steel, to lower costs. “The notion of putting 7,000 people in a building may be a thing of the past,” Jes Staley of Barclays told the paper. “Maybe we don't need all the offices that we currently have around the world,” suggested another banker, while another said that his bank was already thinking about a new location strategy that wasn’t so city-centric. Tom Stringer, a corporate real estate manager in the US with the accounting firm BDO, also told the FT that: “In six weeks we’ve taken almost the entirety of the back offices of corporate America and moved them to kitchens and living rooms and it’s been pretty seamless,” he said. “People are getting used to it. The stray dog or the kid wandering into the conference call is now accepted in corporate and governmental America.”

The story has replicated itself across multiple business sectors where office-based working is commonplace. Sir Martin Sorrell, the advertising industry veteran who now runs S4 Capital, told the Financial Times that he spends around £35 million on business property in a year. “I’d much rather invest that in people than expensive offices,” he said, adding stoically that he has found the new normal of working from home to be “energising”. However, as the lockdown goes on, others are getting stir crazy. The kitchen coffee machine is no substitute for a quick trip to Starbucks, the fridge no replacement for a lunchtime dash to Pret. There are those, too, who cherish the morning and evening commutes as opportunities to place a buffer between home and work life, to catch up on books or podcasts, or simply to spend an hour each way staring out of the train window and contemplating. This is hardly facilitated by a daily routine that mostly revolves around moving between the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, the toilet and occasionally the living room.

Picture: Cisco

Skype, Zoom, Teams, WebEx and all the rest are, undoubtedly, great tools to be able see and hear your colleagues as if they were in the room with you. And it’s been well known for a while what a fortune these platforms save in terms of travel costs, not to mention CO2 emissions. But they do have their limitations. On Saturday we went up to a local golf course that has generously opened its fairways to the public to use for exercise, and I realised just how narrow a vista I’d grown used to during the lockdown. It may not have been a Mediterranean beach or the Lake District, but to see the widescreen panorama of blue sky and grass was enough to widen the stage beyond my laptop screen and the framework of our conservatory. I suppose it reminded me of the loss of freedom caused by the lockdown. That, in an office, I could just get out of my chair and walk over to someone’s desk to ask a question. To do that now - and bear in mind that I’m still getting to know the vast majority of people I work with - you have to intrude with instant messages, e-mail and, if it’s urgent, a phone call. Most if not all of my new colleagues have been wonderfully tolerant of such impertinence, and there’s no reason to think that it won’t last. The bunker spirit appears to be strong, at least with whom I work. But having waited a long time to return to employment, I’m now at that stage of thinking when it would be nice to put on a suit and shoes and get stressed again about which train service SWR has cancelled today. No amount of looking up colleagues’ nostrils via poorly-adjusted laptop webcams can compensate for the social energy you only experience when you are a part of the ‘white collar masses’ assembled in a corporate office. Because there's more to the workday than simply completing tasks.

For now, the lockdown continues to be a great national experiment. The technology has not fallen over, and people are, for the most part, getting on with working from home. Even if the occasional dog barks during a Skype call, or a bored teenager drifts past the camera during a Zoom meeting, it seems hard to imagine that this would continue forever. People do, believe it or not, like to think of their colleagues as a second family, and even welcome being away from their main brood for a few hours each day - irrespective of whether it is conducive to productivity or not.