The Unbearable Lightness of Being Virtual

I have spent a lot of time over the past few months investigating and testing virtual working environments. I really think this is the future. I think that in a few years, we will look back at images of traffic jams and crowded subways and ask, “why did so many people have to travel all that way every day just to do what they could have done at home?”

Granted, not every job fits this category. Health care workers need to go to a hospital to practice much of their craft, as do chefs and bus drivers. But the majority of people who commuted on a daily basis, prior to the pandemic, did so to get to a place where their work was. But now, it appears much of that can be done anywhere.

The key pushback I hear about the who work-from-home thing is that it takes away the spontaneity and togetherness of the office workplace – people being together under one roof provides a tribal comfort, even if you don’t necessarily like all the people there, the fact that they are there touches us in an instinctive way.

Those who think that it’s not possible to be together virtually have good reason for doubting it. They haven’t seen anything that replaces what they perceive as the reality of the office space. That’s an outlook that is very typical of human beings: we judge everything by what we have known in the past, not what is potential in the future.

Imagine, for example, if we were living one hundred years ago, and someone handed you a device you had never seen or heard of before called a telephone. How could it be possible you ask for a person to be crammed inside the wire of this device? And what good would it do? People need to be together in a room in order to get things done.

You can say the same thing about any technological development really. The car, the television, the internet. Every one of these and more were greeted with a collective “so what? It can’t be better than what we have already got.” It takes a few years for any technology to grow into its own.

That’s what I think we’re seeing with virtual office spaces. People cannot grasp the idea that an office space can be an “always on” zone, where colleagues can co-exist casually and talk to each other whenever they want. That’s because up until now, most of the technology that we use has a degree of formality to it. A Zoom call, for example, has mostly been used for scheduled meetings. Emails, too, are formal communications. They’re like old fashioned letters, placed in envelopes and delivered to the recipient. Even text messaging and messaging apps like WhatsApp are pretty formal, even though they start to edge towards casual in their multi-person group conversation style. Slack moved the needle a bit more to the area of spontaneous collaboration, but it, and Microsoft Teams, too, have been something of a hard sell when people can’t see enough of a difference between messaging and email.

There’s another wall of reluctance too, when people are shown images of bulky VR headsets. The idea of moving into a virtual world with headsets and with colleagues appearing as avatars seems just too weird. But I am convinced this is just the typical negative reaction to change that most humans show towards pretty much anything. It’s new, and it doesn’t make sense.

But the same could have been said about black and white photographs. “That doesn’t look like a person, people aren’t monochrome,” could be the pushback. The same could also be said about color photos, or even TV and Instagram reels. “That’s not a person. They’re too small and two-dimensional.” Our mind actually work to interpret what we see and accept it as a version of reality. We have done so since the very first cave painting was made to represent an animal, and the very first sentence was spoken to describe a person. The mind is very good at filling in the gaps.

I am convinced that in a couple of years, the virtual office space will become the new normal, and a trip to the physical office will be a special event. It’s not that humans don’t need to be together, it’s just that they don’t need to be in the same space anymore to do so. We can save that for the special occasions.

My favorite virtual space right now is called Kosy, and I think they are really onto something. I am sure they are not the only ones doing this format, and it’s good if they aren’t, because that only proves the validity of their idea. And full disclosure here, I am not connected with them financially in any other way. I simply found out about hem online and really liked what I saw.

The product, which can be found at kosyoffice.com combines the preferred reality of people’s real faces and voices, delivered by your own computer’s camera and mic, with an office layout, including the spaces we are comfortable with: breakout rooms, cubicles and a kitchenette. The idea here is that while you work from your home office space, you can place your avatar at a cubicle, or in any of the rooms they offer. The key value is that others in your team can also place themselves in the space. If you see someone you want to talk to, you simply guide your avatar across to the zone they occupy, at which point the mic becomes live and the conversation can start.

Of course, the app offers the other collaboration tools like whiteboard tools, messaging and document sharing, but overall it adds a sense of presence that is real enough to feel comfortable without being surreal enough to feel like you are in a video game. Here's what it looks like. I'm standing just behind the blue sofa.

Another great app that follows the same “presence” approach is Toucan, available at toucan.events. It offers a service called Toucan?Space, and it too is designed to be a place where people “are” in the sense they exist, rather than simply logging on for a scheduled meeting. Everyone’s avatar – also a real video of you through your camera – is visible in the space, and to activate a conversation, you simply move your avatar close to someone, or go to a table and have others also sit at the table.

These technologies are not Zoom meetings – they are places to “be’ and to visible to your team while your team remains visible to you.

Some of the resistance that I have heard comes from the notion that it is difficult to have a conversation with an avatar. For a start, it is hard to take them seriously, and secondly, there is the issue of body language. So let’s look at both of those.

An avatar, being a cartoon-style replica of yourself, is indeed insufficient to engage in a fully human conversation. It feels strange to people who have grown up interacting with other humans face-to-face. Yet everyone seems perfectly comfortable talking to a disembodied voice on the phone, and relating to others by way of bubbles of text on a chat app. It’s all about what each person accepts as a valid representative of the person or people they are talking to. People have even allowed themselves the pleasure in half-believing ventriloquist’s puppets as being real. It’s a mental transition that is on par with wading into the ocean – the first few moments feel strange and uncomfortable until your body acclimatizes to its new surroundings.

But there is also the issue of body language, and that’s where I think a big change will happen in virtual presence. During the pandemic, where most people learned about video chat for the first time, they did one of two things – they either turned their camera off, or they sat too close.

Turning the camera off is typical for people who are uncomfortable seeing themselves on camera. This again is similar to the reactions people have when they hear their recoded voice for the first time. “Do I really sound like that?” They don’t necessarily like seeing themselves on live camera, which they consider very different from the more controllable world of social media selfies, and there is indeed a heightened degree of cognitive overload that comes from seeing yourself in real time. So they turn the camera off. And when everyone does that, then it simply becomes a conference call.

There is also the bandwidth reason as well, that video takes up a lot of processing power on computers and requires a reliable ethernet connection to work. This is a legitimate technical reason for turning off a camera, but I want to stick to the emotional ones for the time being.

If they don’t turn the camera off, the other reaction is to sit too close. This, again is a response based perhaps on the human desire to focus in on the face as the primary object of attention during a conversation. It’s the head-and-shoulders, passport photo approach. It might also have a lot to do with desk space, given that many people use the camera mounted on their laptop. But it does not take much to push back just a little, to allow other participants to see your arms and hands.

This, I think will make a major difference. It is, after all how people perceive you in a face-to-face conversation. They rely on facial gestures, but they are also very in tune with body language as a method of conveying the full story. Maybe many people do this already, but from the hundreds of video chats I have been on, I would suggest that most people focus too much on keeping their face in the frame.

I believe that a great many people will grow comfortable in the virtual office. Logging on and sitting their avatar down at their desk, in their office, and looking around to see who else is in today. If a spontaneous meeting needs to be held, it will be just as easy to tap on the virtual shoulders of colleagues and march on down to the virtual meeting space.

I think this will help alleviate Zoom Gloom, a concept that I have referred to in an earlier episode, which refers to the feeling of isolation people feel when a video chat meeting comes to an end. Because when video chat technology was used just for meetings, which are formalized events, its conclusion, where everyone waves goodbye and awkwardly searches their screen for the “leave meeting” button, tended to magnify the sense of isolation felt by almost everyone, but especially by those who are unused to working from home. Being able instead to physically move one’s avatar out of the meeting space and back to their desk, will eliminate this sense of isolation.

As a last point, there was a significant even that happened in the summer of 2021 which was called the Great Resignation. It was a spike in the numbers of people quitting their jobs out of economic necessity, or simply the realization that the job as a whole package, including the commute and its associated costs made it all simply not worth it. Perhaps for some it had to do with the added pressures of the Covid pandemic, especially with kids being home-schooled but when a significant number of people leave their jobs, you have to ask, what about the job made it that unbearable. For many, it’s not the job per se, but the circumstances and working conditions.

There are a lot of talented and valuable people in this group who continue to resign en masse – people who know their jobs and who could do much, if not all of it from a home office, where they can blend work and family responsibilities into a more pragmatic continuum. I find it sad when organizations push back against the idea of working from home simply because managers cannot see if their employees are working or not.

I think these virtual, always-on office setups might help bring both sides closer together. That would be a nice new normal.?

This is the transcript of the CoolTimeLife podcast entitled The Unbearable Lightness of Being Virtual. If you would like to listen to it or review other podcasts in this series, visit my podcast page at stevenprentice.com/podcast.html