Remote work tools suck
All this debate about the value of remote work and no-one seems to be talking about how our “office” is now software-based, and that software sucks.
In truth, there are tools that offer better features, but no big org wants to pay for them when Teams comes gratis with their existing Azure/Entra/365 apparatus. Therefore we’re stymied by the pace that MS can clone features from the Best Software into Teams, because big orgs will not pay for the Best Software when the industry standard is free to use.
I’ve been fully remote, bar about a day per month, since 2020 (that’s five years now!) and I have strong opinions about what the digital office is missing.
I’m just gonna get straight to my top two.
Multi-way screen sharing
Only one person can share their screen at a time in Teams, Slack, and Zoom. Why? Teams prioritises a “presentation” style workflow where one person is presenting. But very little work is done this way - it’s inherently not collaborative.
I want to share one Monitor 1 and see my colleague’s view on Monitor 2.
Why stop at two participants? Every participant could send a screen share instead of a camera video feed if they wanted to, and then each viewer can choose which panel to spotlight.
“Start/stop sharing” is a pernicious papercut and it slows down collaboration every day.
There is a discussion thread about adding this feature to Teams, and a feature suggestion.
Later we’ll look at alternatives, but first:
Ambient presence
When I sat in an office, I was in a desk pod with my scrum team, but I was in a room with every scrum team. When people got up for a coffee they came past and they could ask me a question, or we could check in about something. One of the most regular complaints I hear now is “we don’t know what other people are working on”, and no amount of Product Pipeline Meetings match the effectiveness of standing up, looking, and listening.
When a handful of people filed out to a meeting room, you could ask “where are they going?” and find out they have a meeting about SGNX, then say “oh, I have some technically relevant details about SGNX, I think I should be in that” or alternatively, hey, you just found out that SGNX exists and now you know what your colleagues are engaged in.
You used to be able to see people using spaces, having conversations, and using rooms. Now, everything is completely secret by default… privacy is good, but having no visibility of your colleagues’ meetings, actions, conversations, and workstream is a net negative and it also allows us to toxically shut people out of the collaborative loop.
We need an ambient sense of presence.
There’s gather.town and work adventure but no serious enterprise is going for these because they looks like, and are, games. Anything with that level of customisation is going to knock off 10% from productivity right away, let’s be honest. Where’s my timesheet code for “making custom pixel assets of gundams for my gather town desk”.
In Teams, I want something like a tab for “Spaces” which is built-in and always-on:
- When a channel or group chat is used regularly, it becomes an increasingly boldly outlined shape in Spaces (beginning as a faint shape).
- Each new Space is algorithmically assigned a basic geometric shape and colour to give it a permanent personality (mental geography).
- I can see my colleagues’ avatars (their Teams initials or display pic) in the meeting/chat they were last seen in, possibly with some ghosting or transparency or other indication of recent movement.
- I can see some indicator of “last seen”, based on who I collaborate with most often, with those I don’t collaborate with shown fainter, smaller (and probably further away).
- I can pan around to see the activity “nearest” me and my centers of interest, but it fades to fog at the edges so that I’m not overwhelmed with the movement of hundreds of people in my org.
- I can click on a person to open a chat with them, or click on a room/chat/channel to go there in the chat tab.
Maybe it would conceptually look something like this:
I would settle for some fraction of this idea; I just think it’s a good set of features and compromises:
- If you leave it up to staff to design and set up virtual spaces, either they won’t do it, or their boss will do it, and it will reflect existing hierarchical norms - bad.
- If you rely upon users to move their avatar around a virtual world manually, they’ll either do it obsessively as a game, or hardly at all, making it inaccurate.
- Algorithmic generation makes the space a real-time reflection of reality, not a contrived facsimile.
Alternatives
While researching this post, I found ro.am (not to be confused with the note taking app) which implements ambient presence by showing ad-hoc groupings of people based on activity, and frankly, it looks awesome.
Oh!!, it even has multi-way screen sharing!
Multiple people can share their screen at the same time. One screen share at a time is displayed as the primary share, but it can be easily switched. Additionally, secondary screen shares can be opened in their own window so you can actively view multiple screen shares simultaneously.
I am going to forgive them for splitting two infinitives there and ask, “So why don’t we have Roam instead of Teams?” Because it’s $10.50/mo/active user (dynamically assigned with no overages for unused seats btw – darn, these folks are decent) and Teams came with the house.
So what
I guess I’m waiting for Teams to clone Roam features… or buy them out. But they’ll probably mess that up anyway 😌😌😌
Thanks for reading my opinions, what a gem you are.
Work smarter not harder 💎🤓