With demand for remote-work technology surging, it’s a good time to ask seasoned remote pros about their own preferred tools. When we do, we hear things that seem lost on a lot of startups in this space — namely, that video meetings aren’t a vast improvement over widely disliked office meetings and email isn’t a scourge.

Countless workers — remote and otherwise — are already familiar with Zoom Video Communications, whose stock hit an all-time high of $169 a share in April. This came as its inclusion in the NASDAQ 100 Index was announced and downloads of the video-meeting application continued to soar due to work-from-home mandates in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The company is partnering with Oracle Cloud to allow it to scale its service to meet the growing demand.

Use of similar offerings, such as Google Hangouts Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Cisco Systems Inc.’s Webex, has also multiplied in the past couple of months. These apps basically aim to simulate the face-to-face conversations that take place in physical offices remotely with laptop cameras and microphones.

But what exactly should remote work look like, ideally? Do video applications really aid productivity, or are they just fancy garnishes compared to necessary staples like G Suite and Office 365? Do they replicate the office experience at home? And is that even worth the trouble? 

Startups minimize the meeting

Not surprisingly, plenty of companies are keen to repeat Zoom’s success, and do one better. For example, Facebook just announced expanded video features, including Messenger Rooms, which allow users of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram Direct, WhatsApp and Portal to hold live video calls from within those apps.

There’s also an emerging breed of startups whittling down the extracurricular fuss involved in video meetings — or at least the space they take up on screen. For example, instead of taking over a user’s entire screen as Zoom does, recently launched Around frames users’ faces within small circles. The application, which offers a freemium pricing model, allows up to 15 users to converse on screen while simultaneously reading documents, searching the internet, or whatever they’d normally be doing on their computers. This helps integrate conversations naturally into the workflow, unlike traditional video conferencing that puts all other activities on hold, according to Around Chief Executive Officer Dominik Zane. 

Zoom was “built around decades-old assumptions of what a video call should be,” Zane told TechCrunch in March. 

Essentially, a telephone connected to a video camera, Zoom’s design doesn’t differ much from the first Picturephone demoed at the 1964 World’s Fair. Workers today are fed up with the ceremony of video calls — the scheduling and rescheduling, their interruptive nature, the way they hijack a computer, according to Zane.

“People want to make eye contact. They want to connect. But they also want to get stuff done. Around treats video as the means to an end, not the end in itself,” Zane explained. 

Around’s real-time panning and zooming technology automatically captures users’ faces in an unobtrusive circle. This allows them to talk with colleagues without a major interruption in their workflow. And they can refer to materials like Google Docs or visual presentations without jumping around tabs. Around is currently available in invite-only beta. Users can request access here. 

The so-called “meeting tax” — the time and effort needed to arrange and attend a meeting — needs to be reduced, according to Joe Taylor, co-founder and CEO of Unmeeting Inc. In fact, remote-work tech in general has a lot of extracurricular fat that needs trimming, Taylor told theCUBE.

“Current collab apps are very noisy, making it hard to sift the useful stuff from the less useful stuff,” he said. 

Remote workers often complain of loneliness and disconnection, and video can be a great tool for connecting during the workday and for conveying sentiments that may be lost in text, but they don’t want to make a huge production out of having a quick chat, Taylor added.

“We will see a shift away from scheduled, traditional meetings to ad hoc, super-focused interactions,” he said. 

Unmeeting recently launched Touchbase, a free web-based application with no registration and nothing to download for stripped-down, 15-minute video meetings. Users go to the website, name their meeting, or pick a pre-defined topic, like “Time for coffee” or “Plans for the day,” enter their email address, and receive a shareable URL. The clock starts when someone else joins. 

Asynchronous answer to scheduling woes

If that’s not slimming things down enough, how about no meeting at all? Last year, Loom Inc. secured a $30 million Series B funding round, with Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger among the investors. The app packages video for remote workers’ asynchronous schedules, letting users record and instantly share clips. Videos begin uploading while they are recording, so they can send them off as soon as they’re finished. Like Around, Loom offers freemium pricing.

Remote teams well know the hassle of getting even a few colleagues to agree on a meeting time. Loom allows communications to be opened and ingested when people actually have time. It also allows screensharing so users can show websites, interfaces, documents, etc., as they explain issues or give tutorials. 

In theory, team members could send each other brief Loom videos in place of Slack messages throughout the day. Mercifully, since it sounds rather annoying, they probably won’t.

“We want to be clear about the fact that we don’t think we’re in competition with Slack or Microsoft Teams at all. We are a complementary tool to chat,” Loom co-founder and CEO Joe Thomas told TechCrunch last November. 

Loom and other new video apps do provide integrations with Slack and other popular remote-working tools to streamline use. Integration abilities are especially important as more people move to remote work and acquire a miscellany of software to help with various aspects of their jobs, according to Al Castle, vice president of engineering and product at Flowroute, now part of Intrado. Intrado offers a suite of real-time enterprise collaboration tools.

“Individual tools might be easy to use, but how do they integrate with work processes?” Castle told theCUBE. “I think we’ll … see a continued surge of tools that integrate with our meetings platforms to drive increased productivity and utility.” 

Real remote workers not 100% in love with video meetings

Looking at the slate of startups in the remote-work market, one may assume that video is king in remote work. And as the trend grows, our work days will probably feature increasingly large chunks of video interaction. Here’s the thing, though: A lot of the professionals that have been hacking away at remote work the longest aren’t even that crazy about video. 

A survey of 1,000 in-office, partly remote, and all-remote workers conducted by BoxBoat Technologies LLC found that all workers preferred email, chat and phone over video for communicating. Of the fully remote workers, 33% preferred email versus just 7.8% who preferred video. Perhaps this is because video tends to just transfer office meetings — largely wasteful and unneeded in any case — to a new format. In fact, the knee-jerk scheduling of meetings to discuss every work issue that comes up is one habit all workers should quit straight away. Unnecessary or poorly organized meetings cost businesses $399 billion in the U.S. in 2019, according to Doodle AG’s 2019 “State of Meetings report.”

Launched in 2004, Basecamp is a comprehensive tool for project management and remote collaboration. It’s one of the most popular products of its kind, with 15 million users and several thousand new accounts added weekly, according to some reports. Basecamp LLC has headquarters in Chicago, but nearly all of its 50 staffers work remotely. Co-founder and CEO Jason Fried has a lot to say about what makes remote teams successful. In fact, he and Basecamp co-founder and Chief Technology Officer David Heinemeier Hansson authored a book about it called “Remote: Office Not Required.” For one thing, he likes traditional, long-form, written communication. He likes it a lot. 

When workers go remote, they may cling to old practices that worked on site. This is a mistake, according to Fried.

“The ones who stumble are the ones who try to emulate what they do in the office,” he recently told the Chicago Tribune. Basecamp does not use any meeting-scheduling software internally to avoid wasting team members’ time in pointless meetings. Remote working generally affords collaborators better ways to communicate anyway, according to Fried.

“This is an opportunity to finally not have so many meetings, to write things down instead of saying them out loud,” he added. 

Basecamp uses chat internally mostly for “social stuff,” according to Fried during a podcast from January. For work-related issues, team members write long-form posts that all can discuss in depth over a matter of days on dedicated pages inside Basecamp. This saves people a lot of time, he explained. 

“I think you end up with much deeper and fairer discussions and better discussions. … We do have ‘meetings,’ in a sense, but they’re not meetings in time, like around a room physically or even on video. They are written down, and people respond over a number of days, on their own schedule, and those conversations are much richer,” Fried stated. 

GitLab Inc., the largest all-remote company with over 1,200 employees in more than 65 countries, appears to agree. In a post on the COVID-19 shutdown and remote work, the company, which will be the first all-remote business to IPO later this year, wrote: “Merely transferring planned office meetings to virtual meetings misses an opportunity to answer a fundamental question: Is there a better way to work than to have a meeting in the first place?” 

Picking the right tools for the job

So what place does video have in our newly remote working lives? 

There’s more than one type of message, relationship and level of formality on the spectrum of necessary work communication. Media formats including email, long-form forums, chat, and video will fall into their proper place as teams learn which is best for delivering different information. 

Asynchronous video may lower the meeting tax, but in what way does it improve upon text? Time consumption is obviously a major factor in work, and while people may speak faster than they type, they may also read faster than they speak. And for comprehending dense or difficult information, it may be preferable to have a text available for careful reading and easy referencing. Related to that, users will likely need to draft complex material before they record themselves reciting it, making the point of doing so instead of simply sending the written draft unclear. Also, the time-saving ability to quickly skim and search text is lacking from recorded video meetings that may not have transcripts. 

If some sentiment or nuance is potentially lost in text, then video may be a better delivery mode. And screen recording allows speakers to simultaneously reference and explain different features of photos, graphs, or other materials. A single video/audio combo like this sounds easier to ingest than a text with multiple screenshots dispersed throughout. This may make it a good choice for tasks with a lot of visual content, such as ad making, graphic design, or user interface development. 

Many people want to get to know those on their teams at least a little, but should they do so on or off the clock? Extroverts may thrive on face-to-face interaction, but shy or socially anxious types may find video meetings draining and will not do their best thinking in them.

GitLab’s head of remote, Darren Murph, recently told theCUBE that remote socializing needs its own separate compartment and requires proactive planning. In other words, video meetings to discuss work issues don’t double as virtual office parties.

“You want to have a happy hour virtually; you’re going to have to put a calendar invite on people’s calendar,” Murph recently said during a remotely held interview with theCUBE. “You’re going to create topical channels in Slack for people to talk about things other than work. Someone’s going to have to do that — they don’t just happen by default,” he stated. 

Some companies use social media sites, such as Facebook, or even create their own, for off-duty socializing. They may also use a chat app such as Slack for social conversations, as in Basecamp’s example. If teams are going to use video for purely social interactions, it will have to be very low tax, spontaneous, and, ideally, free of charge. Touchbase does a pretty good job of not making a big deal out of brief conversations. Its URL-sharing model still requires some prearranging of the meeting, however. So far, no one has managed to deliver video chat through any means as simple and immediate as walking across the office floor. 

With remote work in our outlook for the foreseeable future, we’ll have plenty of time and opportunity to find out the answers to these questions ourselves, according to Castle. “As millions more people discover how they can remain productive and engaged working from anywhere, more organizations will have a better understanding of and confidence in how they can more fully embrace remote work technologies,” he said.

Experienced remote companies don’t just not like video meetings — they don’t like meetings, period. And while many remote workers will find a use for the newer video apps, especially during a pandemic that has no end in sight, few today see video as the best tool for everyday collaboration. For now, it appears that still requires a lot of writing via email, chat, or some other easy-to-use tool you probably already have.

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