The techsperts have said it: Covid-19 could be a “watershed moment” for working from home. Handshakes are out, remote working is in and conferences have been culled from calendars — in-person, anyway.
So how do you have a meeting amid the mayhem of the biggest health crisis for a generation?
From virtual boardrooms to video call etiquette, this is how London is connecting in the lockdown.
Zoom is the new boardroom
“It’s now offensive if you don’t put Zoom details on a calendar invite,” says an employee at private banking firm Coutts. As of this week, 100 per cent of the company’s face-to-face meetings have been moved to the cloud-based video conferencing app, which the bank and its clients have been using for a while but “has really come into its own” as London’s lockdown gets underway.
California-founded Zoom is the second most downloaded business app on the UK’s App Store — nearly 600,000 people downloaded it on Sunday alone — and CFO Kelly Steckelberg told Yahoo Finance this week that its meeting minutes were “up significantly” since the end of January.
It’s now the chosen platform for press conferences, university lectures, climate change rallies and birthday parties thanks to its sleek, social-media-like interface (like Instagram, it features filters and backgrounds) and ease of use: you can be dropped into a call with up to 100 people by simply clicking on a link. Research analysts say that it’s simply a “hotter brand” than older rivals like Skype and FaceTime.
Last week Zoom execs lifted the 40-minute limit it imposes on free meetings with more than two participants and designers are working on new features to feed the working-from-home surge, such as filters that frame your face in better lighting.
Conference clans
Coutts and co might be the Zoom evangelists but across the capital, conference call tribes are emerging. Staff at the Department for International Development, Islington tech startup Engine B and consultancy firm EY all use Microsoft’s video conferencing platform Teams, which beat out Zoom on the UK App Store (its site went down on Monday as the capital’s remote working surge took hold), while Google is naturally using its own conferencing platform Hangouts for meetings and job interviews, as is consultancy giant PwC.
The premium version — offering calls with up to 250 participants — has now been made free until July to help companies cope with the crisis.
Apple’s FaceTime, Skype for Business and Cisco’s Webex are among other popular conferencing platforms. Downloads for alternative WFH apps are rocketing: Mural for virtual whiteboards, Trello for collaborative lists, Google Drive for storing assets, Calendly for scheduling and Slack for messaging (mural.co; trello.com; drive.google.com; calendly.com; slack.com).
If you haven’t sent a gif on the office Slack channel, are you even WFH?
Tech-iquette
Slack is the new normal for office chatter but fresh platforms bring fresh rules. The biggest tip from workers at Slack HQ? Custom statuses. “Our co-workers can no longer see when we’re away from our desks, so we set a custom status to let everyone know that we’ve stepped away, or that we’re offline, or on calls and maybe slow to respond,” the site’s new coronavirus remote working guide explains.
Statuses can be set to automatically expire so set your “at lunch” to disappear after an hour.
Gene Villeneuve, CRO of remote working firm Tehama, also warns not to multitask during Zoom meetings. “It’s tempting to check emails or Twitter because you’re still at your desk rather than a conference,” he told Business Insider, but resist the urge.
Clasp your hands under the desk instead.
Face up to video
Across London, the message for video calls is clear: keep your cameras on. “We’ve been told it’s more personal,” says an employee at consulting firm Arcadis. “It feels like we’re in work,” says another from Coutts, quoting a meeting from the bank’s chief executive this week. “He was saying we need to ask each other how our weekends were so we don’t lose over-the-desk chat.”
PwC has also told staff to keep their cameras on to maintain “connectivity”, as has learning platform Degreed “because it helps with non-verbal communication”, and the science agrees.
A recent study from Harvard Business Review found keeping the camera on is “the best thing you can do” when working from home. “Video makes people feel more engaged because it allows team members to see each other’s emotions and reactions, which immediately humanises the room,” it writes. “Facial expressions matter.”
Digital dress codes
Twitter is inevitably awash with “PJ-day!” memes but for most companies, the virtual dress code is smart-casual whether company policy before or not. “It’s quite funny not seeing everyone in a suit and tie,” says one banking employee, who’s relieved to be let off the old PJ-bottoms-and-a-suit technique for daily Zoom meetings.
“I would expect people to keep our smart/casual dress code for video calls,” insists Becky Simms, chief executive of SEO agency Reflect Digital.
Others are relishing the dress-down approach: “I actually found it nice to see my colleagues casually dressed in their home environment,“ says Aisling Gray, head of communications at job site Rest Less, insisting it has “a sense of bringing [them] closer together”.
Deepak Shukla, founder of Shoreditch SEO firm Pearl Lemon, says he understands that work norms go out of the window when the nation is in “survival mode”. “I wouldn’t be disappointed or offended if someone turned up in PJs on a call.”
There is, of course a line, as one viral Tweet reminded us all last week. “Just got an email from a prof: ‘As a reminder, you are required to wear clothes during Zoom meetings.’”
Green screens
An unexpected upside of self-isolation? “With all the extra time on my hands my hair and make-up is impeccable!” says Lou-Lou Mason, a communications manager at Engine B. But for those without the time to spend on contouring tutorials, the talk on Twitter is all about Zoom’s “touch up my appearance” button — just the wonder toggle you need for that early-morning video call with the boss.
But what to have as your background? If you don’t have time to curate your wall art or style your bookshelves (you will by the time the crisis is over), Zoom has a higher-tech solution: a custom background option which lets you set your virtual green screen to anything from an office (nostalgic) to moving countryside as though you’re on a romantic train journey.
One suggestion on Twitter? A mountain of loo rolls.
E-breaks
Going into out-of-office mode is no excuse to ditch water-cooler chatter. In fact, tea breaks and desk gossip are essential for keeping spirits high in times of self-isolation, says chief executive of event company Spacebase Julian Jost. He’s encouraging his team to “over-communicate” over WhatsApp, Slack and Microsoft Meet while at home.
Chairman of BusinessesForSale.com Marcus Markou has introduced a digital “tea at three” session every afternoon — “we all login at three and work together for an hour and people can just chat or mute” (he takes requests for the background soundtrack) — while director of Boxed Out PR Hayley Smith has digitised office socials, too. Zoom meet-ups online “whine and wine” evenings and virtual silent discos are all on part of the social calendar.
“We all tune in together as we dance around our homes like madmen,” she explains.
This revolutionary remote working experiment has begun.
