Now that video calls have become the common means of synchronous communication in recent months, the question arises: what’s next? In the coming weeks and months, there will be a shift back to the “old” working world. We are challenged to decide in all aspects what we want to take with us from the home office period and how we want to shape our work in the future.
Back to Normal
The same applies to video calls. Their importance will now decrease again; one no longer “has to” do everything in video calls. People are allowed to meet physically again, the danger of “Zoom fatigue” is initially averted.
I recently watched a keynote by Phil Libin, the founder of mmhmm and former CEO of Evernote. He made an important statement for me. In essence, he says that in the future we won’t HAVE to spend more time in video calls. Rather, we only use video because we WANT to.
Utilize the Advantages of Video
This makes sense to me. Haven’t we all experienced these moments where we had to admit that we were much more efficient and effective in the video call than in a face-to-face meeting? Because the call was more factual, more compact, more goal-oriented? Haven’t we all participated in webinars that we wouldn’t have attended in person because the journey simply wouldn’t have been possible? Weren’t there moments when we were glad that we could watch a webinar afterwards as a recording? And weren’t we glad that we could specifically choose the important parts and skip the unimportant passages?
The medium of video has many advantages. The combination of image, sound, and story literally stays well in our memory. Asynchronous use leads to more freedom in work planning – I can watch a video when I have the mind for it. And: a video remains stored and can be
Flipped Meetings
Personally, I would like asynchronous communication via video to remain a fixed component of our working world. And I repeat a demand that I had already expressed before Corona: Let’s do more Flipped Meetings. In the future, let’s use our meetings exclusively for discussion, for concrete work on issues in small groups, for brainstorming, for co-working.
The sequences in which someone speaks into the room for minutes armed with slides and imparts “knowledge” can be outsourced. These inputs can be pre-produced as videos. All meeting participants watch the videos in advance, note down questions and important points, and prepare for the known (!) question of the meeting. Then the contents are no longer repeated, but work continues directly.
Which Tool?
There are various tools with which you can create such preparation videos. The easiest: take your smartphone out of your pocket, turn on the video camera and record a story.
Or you can use Loom – a tool for quickly and easily recording video messages and then making them available to a specific group of users.
Another app recommendation would be mmhmm, an app that will focus even more on this aspect of video communication in the future. There, too, the distribution of videos will already be built in and the player will allow easy skipping, chapter divisions, speed control, and even interactivity.
Last but not least, Office 365 should also be mentioned here, where videos can be easily distributed via Stream or SharePoint.
