Feeling a Bit Under the Weather

Saturday I started developing a slight cough. It is now Wednesday and I am feeling a bit under the weather. It could be that I keep waking up early and heading to Alta where I spend an hour hiking up the mountain and skiing down. That probably won't help me feel better but I do admit that I feel rather good even during the hike up. Unfortunately my cough has gotten worse.

I have gotten to the point where if I had to go into an office, I would probably opt to work from home so as not to spread my germs and get anyone else sick. I only wish that whomever gave me the cough had done the same. I have a sneaky suspicion though that it came from a family member as I don't really interact with anyone else.

Fortunately the world of COVID made it possible for me to work from home on a regular basis. It is normal to attend meetings using Zoom, WebEx, or Microsoft Teams. Now we just need to take advantage of the technology and not go into work when we are sick. I know that isn't possible for every job but if you can use it, then please do.

Video Conferencing Suggestions

I am finishing up my sixth month of working from home and last night found myself trying to decide between 2 different video conference calls. Actually there was a third one I could also have attended but opted not to long before last night. Video conference calls are not just for work either. One of the calls I didn't bother attending was for a personal hobby. I know that families are also holding them in place of getting together and risking the spread of COVID-19.

In the first few weeks of working from home, people tried to continue holding meetings as usual. It didn't take long for insightful organizations to realize one or two changes needed to be made. My company put out some specific guidelines for video conferencing and I think many of them are worth sharing.

One of the benefits of face-to-face meetings is that you get up from your desk and walk to a conference room. If you need to stop and use the restroom, you have the option. You also get a minor change of scenery. With video calls you can schedule them back-to-back all day long and never have to leave your desk. An early suggestion we received is to cut back on the length of meetings. Instead of a 30-minute meeting, make it 25. If it is usually an hour, make it 50 minutes. This will allow people time to gather thoughts between meetings, grab a drink or snack, and take a bio-break if needed. My personal preference is to start meetings on the hour or half-hour and end early. Starting 5 or 10 minutes late is a bit tougher for me as I find myself waiting at my desk for the appointed start time.

Another suggestion we received is to see if we can cut down on the number of meetings being held. Some days are so full of meetings that people don't have the chance to do actual real work. What I have done with my team is remove one of our daily stand-ups each week. For those that don't know, daily stand-ups are short meetings where the team quickly reviews progress of daily work. We have them Monday through Thursday but not on Friday. Should something come up and we need to cancel one of the meetings, we reserve Friday for a make-up, just in case.

Cutting down on the number of meetings also goes along with another suggestion: setting aside one day a week with no meetings, if possible. Unfortunately this is a tough one for some people. My boss has multiple meetings every day and so even though we don't have stand-ups on Friday, he still has meetings. I am one of the fortunate ones that has no meetings on Friday and so I don't have to worry about making sure I am at my desk during specific times throughout the day. I generally use this freedom to actually get stuff done. So far this morning I have taken care of a load of paperwork I haven't had time to get to during the week. I am also making sure to put together this posting during my lunch hour so it doesn't distract from the time I am at work.

There are many other suggestions ranging from what to wear (you don't have to wear pants as long as nobody can see your legs), how to make sure you pay attention (taking notes helps me), and always making sure you are muted unless speaking in the meeting. For those that find themselves attending way too many meetings, you can put together an avatar that will attend your meetings for you. It is a funny read and should put a smile on your face even if it does have one or two issues. Good luck with your next meeting.

What Will Work Look Like after COVID-19?

We had a group weekly meeting today at work and the question came about what the office environment will look like after COVID-19. A year ago I worked for a company that felt it important to show up at the office every day. My being able to work from home one day per week was considered a very special circumstance. Now that everyone is working from home, people are questioning the old corporate culture. Furthermore a lot of people are much more effective working from home.

Recently we hired a new project manager and while some of us are effectively working from home, on-boarding a new team member is less than ideal. It takes a lot more mentoring and hand holding to get the new person up to speed. So how will this effect work after COVID-19?

 The meeting at work today was held over Microsoft Teams, which is a relatively new video conferencing application. With the large number of people using the service, there is a lot of innovation happening with the tool. Furthermore there are a number of other similar services that are advancing at an equally rapid pace. Some of the new features being offered are making video conferencing a much more viable option as a replacement for in-person meetings. So how will this effect work after COVID-19?

My wife and I went for a walk this evening and the topic of our cancelled vacation came up. This led to the discussion of whether or not I will need to travel as much for work. I had one year where I went to Japan something like 7 times. We don't think it will be necessary to ever fly that much in the future but are not quite sure. Will other people want to be travelling as much as they have in?

Unfortunately I don't have any answers. I could make a prediction but will most likely be wrong. I would like to believe that I will be able to work from home most days of the week. That would really help me rack up the ski days in winter. I would like to believe that I will still get all of those wonderful trips to the exotic country of Japan. Unfortunately that doesn't work with the scenario of working from home more often. Ultimately the current work environment is evolving and we are not done yet. Hopefully we can all look forward to those changes. While many people are filing for unemployment, I sincerely hope there is a place for everyone and think there will be. Of all the things I want to be right about the last one is the most important.

My Favorite Video Conference Application

I have not been to my office since March 7 of this year. Fortunately I still have a job but not going to the office because of COVID-19 means that I have to do all of my meetings using video conferencing applications. While it would be nice to take my meetings outside using my smartphone, I do 100% of my meetings using my laptop computer. For this reason, my favorite app is based on features available for the computer and not the smartphone. Furthermore it is important to know that I use my MacBook Pro and not a Windows laptop.

There are 3 major video conferencing applications: Zoom, WebEx, and Microsoft Teams. If Microsoft Teams sounds like a new product, it is based on their acquisition of Skype and leverages many years of experience doing video calls.

Unfortunately Zoom got a black-eye with a security breech early in the COVID-19 days. Because of that, my company does not allow anyone to use it for meetings. My understanding is that Zoom did a great job getting a fix in place and has gotten a lot of users with their free product which limits meeting times to only 40 minutes and have less than 100 people. My wife holds a weekly Zoom meeting on Emergency Preparedness for people in our community. She likes the 40-minute time limit as it keeps her meetings short and they can't run long.

WebEx has been around for a long time and is the video conference application I have used the longest. Recently I had a company-wide conference hosted on WebEx with around 200 participants. I recorded the conference and then sent people in my company links to the videos. That allowed people to view the conference even though they couldn't attend in person. Some of the presentations contained videos and WebEx has the ability to optimize for presentation text or multimedia (video and audio). That came in very handy. I also recently attended a company-wide WebEx meeting with 1000 people, which is the upper limit for the tool.

Finally there is Microsoft Teams and it seems to be the application of choice that my company is gravitating towards. One reason is that we use Office 365 applications and that means Outlook is our e-mail and scheduling program. When you want to schedule a video conference, you just click a button in the calendar program and a Teams meeting is automatically created. With WebEx, you have an extra step of logging into WebEx and setting up the meeting. My personal observation is that the quality of Teams is better than the other two video conferencing applications. The audio seems to be more clear and the video is equally impressive. Finally my favorite feature of Teams is the ability to use a virtual background. I took a picture of Snowbird and use it as my background, hiding the ugly gray walls and whiteboard in my home office. It does have the added conversation starter as people continually ask me if there is snow still in Utah.

So what is my favorite video conferencing application? It depends. If you are looking for a free solution, I think Zoom is probably your best bet. Unfortunately I don't have much experience with it. I also like WebEx for large meetings as they seem to have the better solution. Ultimately my workhorse for small group meetings is Microsoft Teams and I probably use it the most. All 3 solutions are full featured and differ only slightly in capabilities.

One final note is that I never see the bill for any of the video conferencing applications I use and so I have no idea on how much any of them cost. If cost is an issue for you, then you may rank the solutions differently.

Sneaker-Net to the Rescue

Yesterday I had an online training course to attend. The course used a special plug-in for WebEx and my Mac just didn't want to load it. I borrowed a department laptop and spent several minutes getting it set up for the training course.

The first thing I noticed is that the borrowed laptop didn't have the WiFi network set up correctly. Getting on the corporate network required a trip to our IT department. Since I didn't want to do that, I just got onto our guest network. The only problem is that I couldn't reach any of our internal servers. Since I just needed to get to WebEx this shouldn't have been a serious issue except for the fact that I needed to copy a very lengthy URL from my e-mail to get into the course.

After playing around for a few minutes, I did what I used to do 25 years ago before ubiquitous WiFi: I pulled out portable media. In the past, this used to be a floppy disk but yesterday I used a thumb drive or memory stick. I copied a small text file to the stick from my e-mail laptop and then moved it to the loaner laptop. When it came time to join the training course, I simply copied the URL from the small file and I didn't have to worry about manually typing it into my browser. Once the class ended, I returned the laptop.

There are a number of different solutions to most problems. Sometimes we get so fixated on using new methods that could easily be solved by taking a step back and thinking a bit before acting. In my case, the most elegant solution actually turned out to be what we used to call Sneaker-Net.

Working from Home

This morning I sat at a cafe in Tokyo eating breakfast and looking out the window at all of the people coming from trains and heading to work. On Monday evening I got to visit one of my work colleagues that lives here in Tokyo for dinner. This morning I realized that most everyone here lives in a tall building, takes a train to another tall building, works in the tall building, takes a train home at the end of the day, only to repeat the process the next day.

Think of the infrastructure required to move everyone around and how much smaller it could be if we didn't require so many people to work in an office every day. Furthermore, think of how much cost savings there would be if you didn't require office space for everyone.

I work from home on Friday's. I chose that day of the week as it allows me to spend more consecutive time at home. Remember that I fly to work on Monday mornings and don't return home until Thursday evenings. Let's assume I have 5 people on my team and we all decide that each of us will work from home one day per week. Someone works from home on Monday, someone else on Tuesday, etc. My team no longer needs 5 work spaces at the office, we now only need 4. Of course this does have the problem that we never have the entire team in the office at any given time. However that is a problem that can be easily solved. A number of companies don't assign permanent work spaces and just provide the technology so people can move around at will.

As I sat at breakfast this morning, I wondered how many of these people really need to go to an office anyways. There are a number of jobs where people only go to an office because of tradition. There are some forward thinking companies that allow people to do their jobs from home. I have a neighbor that used to work in JetBlue's call center. She woke up every morning, logged into the system to say she was working, and took phone calls all day long from the comfort of her home. At the end of the day, she logged out of the system and stopped receiving phone calls. If a manager felt the need to monitor her work, a number of key indicators exist: number of calls answered, average length of calls, average time between calls, etc. Even then if the manager felt my neighbor wasn't doing a good job, the manager could listen in on the calls.

Call centers should be small and everyone should follow the telecommuting principle. My daughter used to work for one and she was required to go in every day. She hated it. Eventually she quit and took a different job. Now the company needs to retrain someone else and while it probably doesn't cost very much, it isn't free.

There are a number of other jobs that could offer telecommuting as an option. Technology is advancing to the point where simulated face-to-face meetings are getting better and less expensive. WebEx and GotoMeeting are a step in the right direction but they could be greatly improved simply by improving their interface for allowing multiple cameras and screens to be used. That would allow for people's faces to be viewed along with whiteboards and presentation materials.

I am a manager and feel like I need to be in the office to monitor what is happening with my team. Perhaps I am the one that needs to take a step back and figure out how my job responsibilities can be streamlined through telecommuting. I have figured out how to make 1 day per week work. My next step may be as simple as figuring out how to make it 2.

My Poor Wife, Part II

Yesterday I started the story about how great my wife is but how she has had to deal with technical issues at home while I am gone. The first issue was about pulling video from our camera and putting it on the computer so my youngest son can edit it for a school project. She was able to get that problem solved only to wake up yesterday and have another computer glitch to solve.

One of the companies I was involved with over the past couple of years is in the process of being sold. They have a demo server running in my basement. This allows them to do sales presentations and testing without having to have an expensive machine in a co-location facility (where most web-based businesses keep their production servers). Yesterday was supposed to be another demo for the purchasing company and it was scheduled for 6:00 am PDT. That sounds early for me, but they are on the East coast and we had to include someone from India. 6:00 am turns out to be an optimal time for such calls.

At about 10 minutes before the meeting was supposed to start, I got a call from the person doing the demo, who said he couldn't get to the server. I was just turning on my computer and so I began looking into the problem. The first thing I did was call my wife to see if the server was still running. It wasn't. There was a power flicker the previous night and it shut down all of the computers in the house. Having the server on an uninterruptable power supply (UPS) would have alleviated the problem, but the one I have needs the battery replaced. I guess I had better add that to my list of things to do.

The demo server has been running so long without any problems, I could not remember the process to restart everything. The first thing I had my wife do, was to turn the machine on. While it was booting, I had her go through my office looking for my notebook associated with that computer. She then looked through my notes until she found the right page with the restart instructions. It was one line of cryptic code that was nearly impossible to read. Fortunately it was enough to jog my memory and we had everything running a minute later.

I logged into the conference call and WebEx demo, which was the sign to the presenter that the machine was back up and he could safely move into the live-demo portion of the meeting. Everything went well and my wife saved the day once again. Now I just hope nothing else goes wrong.

Don't Sell Yourself Short

This morning I had to get up at the crack of dawn for a conference call that involved people from around the world. For the past couple of years I have been involved with a company that created software to quantify how salespeople are successful. Once you know why, you can then coach your other salespeople to be more like them. This morning's call was with our management and the management of another large company interested in buying us.

I sat in my office watching a Webex demo of our software thinking how glad I was that it was someone else giving the demo. I have watched plenty of software demos using Webex or GotoMeeting but have never had the pleasure of starting the demo. I'm sure I could figure it out, I just have never done it.

The whole experience made me think back to a spreadsheet I once saw at a friend's house. I thought I was a big Microsoft Excel user until I saw what my buddy was using to keep track of his daily bicycle rides. The spreadsheet was a work of art. There were lots of different colors with graphs showing day-over-day performance increases. I knew Excel could do all of that but had never seen anyone use all of those features.

Amazingly the person giving this morning's demo and my friend with the elaborate spreadsheet don't consider themselves as knowledgable computer users. Given the choice of rating themselves as novice, intermediate, or expert, they would both choose novice. I think they deserve better.

Anyone that uses a computer daily deserves more than a novice self score for computer proficiency. You may only use your computer for e-mail or writing a BLOG, but that gives you some experience. So if you see yourself as a computer novice but are a frequent user, then don't sell yourself short. The next time someone asks you about your computer skills, confidently reply, "I'm a BLOG reading expert."

High-tech Software Demos

This morning I participated in a demo of some software I have written over the last year. The demo was to a very large company based on the East coast. The meeting went extremely well and I was glad the software worked as designed. There are one or two flaws that I recognized but I doubt anyone else would see them.

The demo was really kind of amazing. Nobody had to get on a plane to fly to the demo location. Furthermore nobody had to even get in a car to be a part of the demo. Instead we used a product called "GoToMeeting" which is very similar to WebEx. Both products allow you to share the information on your computer screen with those whom you invite to your meeting. Your invitees can then log onto the party from their computers in their offices or homes.

This morning one of my partners on the project brought his Mac computer to my house. We plugged it into the wall, turned it on, and connected it to my wireless network. A couple minutes later we started the meeting and waited for the participants to join. There was no need to use a phone to dial into a conference call because we could use the computer's built-in microphone and speakers. If your computer didn't have a microphone and speakers, you could revert to using your phone. I had a phone ready just-in-case but was glad I didn't need it.

There were a total of six participants in the meeting. A third partner made the drive to my house while another decided to join from the comfort of his home office. Then there were two participants joining us from the East coast in two different locations. If necessary, we could have added many more participants.

The meeting lasted a total of 90 minutes and was a huge success. If we had tried to do the demo in person, it would have required two days of travel, an overnight hotel stay, a rental car, several expensive meals, and a huge amount of worrying. Things went well enough that we will be having another meeting in a couple of weeks. However that one will have to be in person. It's a good thing I have a lot of frequent flyer miles I can use.