You're on mute!

It was during yesterday's 10 Downing Street coronavirus press conference that I was suddenly restored to the corporate life I left behind a few months ago. If you've been watching these 'pressers', as they're known in the trade, you'll have seen them alter in a matter of days. At first there would be a No.10 stateroom packed with the nation's political editors (Kuenssberg, Peston, Rigby, et al) throwing questions at the prime minister, the UK's chief medical officer and its chief science officer, each standing side-by-side like The Three Amigos. Now, it's a sparse chamber, with the spokespeople du jour spaced the requisite two metres apart, fielding questions via video from journalists bunkered in their home offices and no doubt hoping that an errant child doesn't suddenly burst in.

Yesterday's update from Chancellor Rishi Sunak and deputy CMO Jennie Harries took me back to almost every corporate conference call I've ever been on: the Daily Telegraph's political correspondent commenced her question without unmuting her microphone, prompting Sunak to utter the immortal words of every virtual meeting host: "I think you're on mute." ITV's ever-languid Robert Peston went further by not fully hearing Sunak's invitation to speak, responding with "Oh shit! Er...hello...". We've all done it. Watch any amount of television now and news programming has now become a replica of corporate life. News studios are now virtually empty as anchors conduct interviews via FaceTime or Skype. No wonder those working in the TV industry are fearing for their long term futures as viewers grow used to the sight and sound of talking heads coming through laptop, tablet and smartphone cameras, just as simply as they did when sat across the studio set. Broadcasters have too much professional pride to consider this to be the future, however. TV in the HD era relies on sharp images and that can only be achieved in a studio with state-of-the-art imaging technology and participants appearing on camera properly lit and made up for the medium.

The rapid conversion to video conferencing to keep a nation in lockdown informed and entertained has, though, been interesting. Sky News even went as far the other day as running a Q&A segment on coronavirus maternity health in which all three participants - presenter Sarah-Jane Mee, who is 26 weeks pregnant, Dr. Zoe Williams and Sharon Gamon of Private Midwives - appeared from home via laptops. As crude and as sometimes unpredictable as it can be when home bandwidth wobbles, it was remarkably effective. I just know how trepidatious it must be for producers normally used to rock-solid studio connections who don't have to deal with the vagaries of network coverage.

This week, for the first time, millions of people in Britain will be trying out video conferencing for the first time. For some, it will be an amusing novelty as the family gathers virtually on a Houseparty screen or socially distanced by Zoom's 'gallery mode', which turns the session into The Brady Bunch title sequence. For those of us used to corporate meetings over Webex, Skype or Microsoft Teams, it'll be second nature. In my last company, where the HQ team was often spread over substantial distances of the San Francisco Bay Area by flexible working arrangements, it was simply the norm for some to be in the office with others in their kitchens or wherever they did their work from home.

But, whether for carrying on with work or simply having a family gathering, virtual meetings do require etiquette. The biggest bugbear I've experienced on business calls is people forgetting that they're not in the same room. Even with galleried platforms like Zoom it's important for everyone to remain in vision so that you know when a current speaker has stopped, and you can interject without crashing the latency that sometimes makes these systems cacophonous. That also requires everyone to remember that you're dealing with home broadband connections and, usually, WiFi, which can be compromised by a fellow dweller zapping a jacket potato in the microwave, or a child killing the boredom by playing Fortnite online. I have been on conference calls where reception quality for some participants has meant everyone saying "over" after they've said their piece. I'm not kidding.

There are simple rules for making video conferencing both effective and not the weird experience it might seem at first. The first is to make sure your equipment is properly set-up. With many business users now finding that their working day, which would otherwise be a mixture of formal and informal meetings and encounters, is now one conference call after another, time efficiency is vital. Nothing truncates an hour-long slot more than connections dropping or speakers cutting out because they weren't tested to begin with. This is especially important with video conferencing, so check that your camera and microphones are working properly. Next, have a planned agenda. Even if you're just 'huddling' with your team to feel the love, you're not in the coffee area hanging out. Time - especially now - is money. As nice as it will be to share experiences of your own life at home under lockdown, keep the social chit-chat to a minimum, so that you can focus, in the limited window you have available, on the priorities to update everyone on. Save the cat news for Facebook.

The other key point of etiquette is to stay in the call. Unless you're in a listen-only 'virtual town hall meeting', there should be no sneaking out to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, or even worse, to the toilet for a pee. This is especially important if you're wearing Airpods and remain connected throughout. Be reassured, I do not speak from personal experience here, but we recently saw Dale Ross, the mayor of Georgetown in Texas, briefly leave a city council meeting for a 'bathroom break' with his microphone still switched on. This doesn't just happen to Frank Drebin. That said, wherever you do your video calls, choose somewhere quiet. Even with laptop or smartphone microphones these days being highly sophisticated, unless you're in a home studio, with sound baffles and a broadcast-grade microphone, background noise will still disrupt the audio. That means not opening the window if you live under a Heathrow flightpath, as I do, or on a busy road...when roads are busier again, of course. The best way to ensure a video conference call runs smoothly is for studious use of the mute button, so that bandwidth is optimised, but as the Telegraph reporter found yesterday, you've got to stay on top of things so that when it's your turn to speak, your fellow conferencers aren't resorting to lip reading.

For the corporate world, ever conscious of social responsibility (as well as dividend-minded shareholders), the COVID-19 lockdown will be disruptive, for sure, but the absence of business travel will be exactly the sort of thing chief financial officers will lap up. Discretionary travel is normally the first casualty of financial cutbacks, and when you add CSR commitments, companies have been imposing travel bans long before the current crisis reared its ugly head. According to the Global Business Travel Association, the coronavirus is expected to impact the business travel sector by $820 billion as corporate travel is pared right back, especially in Asia where at least three out of every four companies have cancelled or suspended all or most travel to China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and other countries in the continent. Environmentalists will no doubt be rejoicing, too. I spent most of my time in my last company travelling, and I can attest that it really isn't the glamourous life it might seem. Yes, it's nice to have a meeting over lunch in Paris, but not much fun being sealed into an air-conditioned conference room in Dubai for a meeting you could have just as efficiently conducted via Zoom and without a tedious seven-hour flight and all the time zone carnage it causes. When we all return to normal, I wonder whether business travel will ever be the same again.