The Undeniable Trends Defining the Modern Meeting Experience - Part 3 The Untamed Workflow

The World is More Than Just Flat. It is an Untamed Workflow That is Taking Over

In 2005, Thomas Friedman released the international best seller The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. The title was a metaphor for viewing the world as a level playing field in terms of business, wherein all competitors have an equal opportunity. Underlying what is now a well-accepted view of globalization, was a host of technologies that enabled this flattening effect to take place – wireless communications, voice over IP (VoIP), instant messaging (IM), and robust information and file sharing technologies. 

One outcome of the adoption of these technologies was the business term of “follow the sun.” This term comprised the idea that through these communication technologies, a single unit of “work” could be continuously acted upon by globally disbursed teams. What started as a meeting in California would move to action items for the team in the UK and then evolve into a design sprint for the folks in China.

My Schedule is an Untamed Monster

For someone like myself who was involved in multiple phases of product planning, the “follow the sun” work dogma resulted in a schedule of meetings and calls that did not end. It was not unusual to be on a 9 PM call with Beijing and then waking up for a 6 AM call with London. I am sure many of you can relate to this situation. But, even if you are lucky enough to work and interact with people in the same time zone, the culture of exponentially increasing meetings, call, and emails leaves the average worker a prisoner of their own schedule. Two Bain & Company partners mapped out a typical manager’s weekly time budget and how it is spent. By their estimates, more than 16 hours per week could be liberated from meeting / email madness.

Manager’s Weekly Time Budget

Source: Time, Talent, Energy: Overcome Organizational Drag and Unleash Your Team's Productive Power Michael Mankin and Eric Garton

And it gets worse for executives. Many executives now receive some 200 e-mails a day—more than 30,000 a year—and the increasing use of IM and crowdsourcing applications promises to compound the problem. What was a laborious process of writing a letter, sending it and waiting for a response is now cut down to seconds. Plus, that executive’s email address is as easy to figure out as anyone’s in a company ([email protected] or [email protected]).

Increase of Executive Communications over Time

Source: Harvard Business Review, May 2014 “Your Scarcest Resource” by Michael Mankins, Chris Brahm and Greg Caimi

Many factors are contributing to this increase in this culture of over-excessive personal communications “let’s meet” culture, but three seem to be leading this change. 

• According to recent estimates from Gallup and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 22% of Americans work from home, while nearly 50% are involved with remote or virtual team work. 
• Teams have been getting larger and larger, some even exceeding 100 people for complex projects, according to one study.
• As the incremental cost of one-to-one and one-to-many communications has declined, the number of interactions has radically multiplied.

In other words, teams are getting larger and more distributed and the ability to send out communications has become cheap and easy for all. 

This has made true collaboration increasingly difficult to achieve in a sea of noise.

UNDENIABLE TREND –Successful Workflows Are Enabling the End User to Manage His Collaboration Chaos, As Opposed to Chaos Managing the End User

The bottom line is that businesses need to proactively wrangle all this “fast and free” communicating. Like most modern enterprise challenges, the solution typically involves a combination of change in how people behave, the defined process they are asked to follow, and the technology that enables them to follow the process. In answer to this challenge, Unified Communication vendors have put forth “omnichannel communications platforms” that have exciting and effective tools built into their solution stack.  But, before diving into the features sets, the “how to’s” or the analysis of the tool’s effectiveness, we need to align on the core problem. End users need workflows they can control, not ones that control them.

The Workflow Within A Meeting

Let’s start at the beginning. What is a workflow? Although the origins of the word are found in manufacturing and the use eventually expanded into engineering and general technological operations, workflows in this case can be defined as follows –

Workflows are the way people get work done and can be illustrated as series of steps that need to be completed sequentially in a diagram or checklist.

For this brief, I want to focus on Meeting Workflows, which can, and often do, move between different software platforms, user interfaces, and locations both real and virtual. Even within these options and variations, a typical meeting workflow looks like this:

Typical Meeting Workflow

Source: Wainhouse Research, 2019 - with contributions by Nathan Yang

In the past, the Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) industry had focused on the middle three columns, which represent the actual meeting. Yet the opportunity also was to unify the pre and post meeting experience with the meeting itself into a single “meeting unit.” Several recognizable offerings came to market to address this need such as Microsoft Teams or Cisco Spark (now Webex). This created a nice, neat package around a meeting unit. 

But people work beyond just meetings. It’s the additional emails, text, phone calls, files and hallway conversations that add to the work and its output. This is where the chaos starts for most, and this is where the opportunity was forming – a way to wrangle all these interactive activities and events in to a manageable context. Welcome to collaboration.

The Workflow of Collaboration

So, if a meeting is a unit within a larger process, what is the workflow of collaboration? I believe it looks like the visual below.

The Workflow of Collaboration

Source: Wainhouse Research, 2019

In this diagram, you can see how a singular meeting has interrelated elements that lend perspective to the core “meeting” - where and when did the discussion take place (context), who was present and who was not (people), what was the visual or verbal information being shared (content).  A meeting cluster is represented by the large circle surrounded by smaller circles. As time moves forward the person may engage in another meeting cluster on the topic. In between each meeting cluster, some additional contextual information may add to the workflow.

“Did you see the report that Bob completed on the customer account?” = content

“I was talking to Mary by the water cooler, and she had some interesting insights on the problem” = people

This pattern of interconnected communications, content and context reveal the workflow of collaboration. 

The Workflow of the Workday

Hold on. This is not the end of this analysis. There is even a bigger picture for us to acknowledge. Most of us do not work on single projects. In fact, we manage several workflows simultaneously. Your meeting at 9 AM is on one distinct topic while your next meeting at 10 AM is on another.  Multiple and even overlapping workflows start to lay out what I think of as the unadulterated definition of a person’s workday. As shown below, multiple workflows in a single workday make this all look very chaotic. This is where modern tools for collaboration come in to help us align these into manageable workflows and tame the collaboration chaos.

The Workflow of the Workday

Source: Wainhouse Research, 2019

Tools for Collaboration

As mentioned earlier, it’s only been within the last four years that the UC&C industry has stepped up with a host of omnichannel and unifying tools to help us align our workflows. Although Slack was first introduced in 2013, its offering did not really catch stride until 2015 or 2016. This was soon followed by Microsoft Teams – launched at the end of 2017, and Cisco officially combining Spark and Webex into a single platform in early 2018.

What these tools offered was a much-needed way for end users to align asynchronous collaboration with real-time communications. Nevertheless, end users and businesses still had need for other workflow tools that were application-specific. Lines were blurring and end user found themselves leaving one workflow to interact with information in another.

The Confusing Myriad of Collaboration Tools

Source: Wainhouse Research, 2019 - with contributions by Nathan Yang

This is starting to seem dire, but all is not lost. Alas, the tools are catching up with the trend that this brief is focused on – “Successful workflows enable the end user to manage collaboration chaos.” 

The key turning point has been the ability for the end user’s needs to drive the movement of the workflow versus the feature (or feature limitations) of the collaboration tool. Here are a few examples of this taking place

• Salesforce.com continues to expand its AppExchange to include more communications tools and platforms. For example, with a few clicks, you can start a Zoom Meeting with your contacts and record your conversation in your Salesforce activity history.
• In November of 2019, Microsoft, Zoom, and Cisco announced plans for interoperability in early 2020 through WebRTC technology. Basically, an end user in a Teams client can join a Cisco or Zoom video call through the native HTML5 experience of those platforms. This means the end user would have all the user experience (UX) benefits of the Zoom or Cisco call without leaving the Teams environment. When done with the video call, they would resume their Teams workflow experience within the same context in which they started the call.
• Communication API’s have become so accessible that we have even gotten to where third-party services like  Zapier can offer video or UC&C-centric API’s from Zoom, RingCentral, Cisco, and GoToMeeting as well as others in an online marketplace environment. Developers can easily connect these with other workflows like PayPal, Asana, HubSpot CRM and beyond. Mind you – these integrations can now be created and enabled completely outside of the target workflow environment (PayPal for example) through the Zapier website.

Predicting Key Features in Winning Workflows

I can only highlight some of the ins and outs of the concepts mentioned above so don’t think of this as a definitive answer to the challenge of fixing modern-day workflows. Instead, the takeaway should be this: As workflow enablement becomes more integral to the business, the winning workflows will be the ones that enable end users to work seamlessly in the environments they prefer, on projects they deem important, with access to information and communications they manage. 

In figuring this out, I anticipate the following to be essential or soon-to-be essential functionality within a collaboration environment

• Persistence – Although we all jokingly dread the meeting that never ends, in the context of persistent access to information, this is a good thing. As illustrated in the earlier diagram, a meeting cluster should remain connected to its subsequent meeting clusters. And more importantly, you should be able to access the information created or discussed in that earlier meeting.
• Ability to interconnect workflows - I’ve already discussed the value of API’s but the uses for the interconnected workflow goes beyond just making meetings happen. The adoption of team messaging and online collaboration as a better way to get work done has amplified the use of video to add the “human element” to these interactions. Market-leading UC&C solutions readily include video alongside, and in most workflows, one-click away within their online collaboration tools. Don’t dread the video call. It may be the only face-to-face interaction you can get with your team and the chance to experience the subtleties and heuristics that lend depth to the work being done and the goals at hand. 
• AI and Automation – In trying to manage our collaborations, the market is prime for AI and automation to help build low walls that protect the end user’s time and productivity, but at the same time help deliver information or answers for the ones initiating the communication. This type of technology is currently being used in customer service environments and should easily be adopted for meeting workflows. Imagine reaching out to a colleague for an answer to a question, and an AI politely screening the call, answering the question or moving it to the most effective form of collaboration. It’s here now, we just need to make it end user friendly for collaboration workflows!

This concludes my series on the Undeniable Trends Defining the Modern Meeting Experience. Although there are many trends to highlight, the three that I focused on should lend to you a sense of positive energy regarding the future of work. In the end, the solution is right within our grasps if we focus on how the workforce, the workplace, and the workflow all come together to enable us to meet, work, and communicate. 

Craig Durr is a Senior Analyst at Wainhouse Research, LLC with a focus on Meeting Room Collaboration technologies and solutions. He provides research on market sizing and forecasts, product and service evaluations, market trends, and end user & buyer expectations. Craig brings nineteen years of experience in leadership roles related to product development, strategic planning, P&L management, value proposition definition, and business development of security, SaaS and Unified Communication products and services. Craig’s experience includes roles at Poly, Dell, Microsoft and IBM.  

He can be reached at [email protected]

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