Conference calls

My wife works in a manufacturing and services company. Because of the lockdown, she's working from home now. And very soon, her way of working has become like how mine used to be until recently in an IT services company - staying on conference calls all day. While it's not totally related to working from home in general, the proliferation of conference calls in non-IT organizations to this extent has definitely been caused by the sudden switch to work-from-home mode of working.

The main reasons conference calls started and became inevitable in IT organisations was the presence of teams in multiple locations collaborating on projects or business development activities and onsite-offshore delivery models. It did save costs because people could now communicate real time with everybody, travel was cut down to the bare minimum and calls/internet bandwidth kept getting cheaper.

But then, and gradually, attending calls became the job of many people, especially those in the upper-middle and higher management. And who do they talk to all day? Everybody in a band around their own level in their company. Many of these so called leaders are accountable for a lot of things, but don't do any of it. And a handful few are the doers who have to sit in all these calls, take note of action items, and work whenever they get time-out from these calls.

Why do we have so many calls?

• Status checkpoints and sync-ups: A lot of these calls are to get everyone on the same page on any common task or project. In situations like large deals with large team working on the pursuits, these sync-ups may need to be as frequent as twice a day, because of too many moving parts moving too soon.
• Over emphasis on being on the same page: Often half my day went into getting everyone on the same page when I was working on large RFP responses. I have been part of deals where there were morning checkpoint calls and evening checkpoint calls with everybody, and then many checkpoint calls during the day with smaller groups of key people. And when you are one of the 4-5 doers in a deal team of 50 people, you'd almost kill yourself getting everyone in sync with what's going on, besides being in sync yourself with the sales strategy and moods of the leaders.
• Working sessions: With screen sharing becoming more easy during conference calls, like over Teams or Skype for Business, participants are compelled to glue themselves to screens while they talk or listen. Someone presenting stuff, updating a document, preparing notes as things get discussed, and so on have become so common that without a screen being shared it has started to feel a bit awkward being on a conference call, especially those conducted over web through softwares like Teams. The earlier method of dialing a bridge on phone was better in letting participants move around carrying their phones. But now they have to sit and watch their screens for as long as the call goes on. While it makes it more effective visually to be looking at the stuff getting discussed, it still drains the mind if dragged for too long.
• Looking busy: For many leaders in the remote-working world, all they do is to attend calls. Their relevance in the company is from 2 things - their designation and their presence in these calls. The importance any project, assignment, deal/pursuit gets is determined by who is engaged. If something's not getting sufficient seriousness, engage one more leader, preferably a bad-ass one who is known to get the job done, and the guys actually working on it lose more sleep.
• Top-down flow of stupidity: It is a cultural thing as well in many companies, and starts from the top. May be the CEO or founder chairman likes it, and to please or comply each layer below starts following the practice and it becomes the culture of the company.
• Trying to be in control, urge to review: Many senior folks who are privileged enough to get a cabin of their own are isolated to an extreme degree. They just have a connected laptop and a telephone, and all they can do with those is emails, calls and documents. It's easy for stress to build up sitting alone in such small enclosed spaces. The constant fear of losing control gets into the head and they end up asking for calls with everybody. They rarely set them up themselves coz they are too senior to send meeting invites. They'd often 'demand' for calls.
• Reviewing team members one-by-one: This is done to either create fear among the rest when one is reviewed or just to create awareness within team of what each one is doing. Another more common reason is the difficulty of catching each person individually, so it helps setting up a call where attendance of everyone is expected. But going one-by-one is a terrible waste of time for everybody on the call. Nor are the "good" objectives met ever.
• Projecting the right "corporate" personality: In certain industries, being on calls has become synonymous with work. Also, there is a certain image that one projects in these companies and it has to manifest most prominently in the calls one attends, because that's what he/she would be known as in the company. As everyone is remote, how you appear in calls is what matters. And to matter in the ecosystem, it is generally more important to be seen/heard in the calls, especially flaunting that personality, if you think you manage to get an impactful one across. It could spin your head meeting people in person after hearing their voice for long time in calls.
• Fear of appearing incompetent: I have come across many leaders who lost the political race because of not being visible and audible enough. It's like class participation in IIMs, where students get some marks for participating in the class. When it's truly observed by the instructor, the desperation is visibly pathetic.
• Gathering a herd: Now this is especially true for the weak leaders, which is the majority of them. They like to get everyone into calls and go on and on without much of an agenda. In their fear and insecurity they end up wasting times of a lot of people. It severely impedes the efficiency of their teams and hampers the outcome.
• Networking and organizational politics getting redefined: While still a lot of effective leaders prefer traveling and meeting people to build meaningful relationships and strong networks within their organizations, companies are gradually cutting down on such travel budgets. And this makes it more and more difficult to connect with people at personal level. Small talk and gossip are getting constrained by the medium of exchange. So one has to make calls to somehow achieve a degree of bonding. There are internal text messengers too in companies, but they have very limited effectiveness - with buddies you can go hours on them in say a side-window conversation while you are working on something else, but for professional connections you tend to be strictly transactional in these messengers. Smarter conversations can happen only in calls or in person.

My sincere suggestions to those who already are and those who are now getting obsessed with conference calls are:

• Think whether a meeting is necessary and whether there are better alternatives.
• Choose meeting participants very carefully.
• Don't have any meeting longer than 30 mins. Shorter the better.
• Make sure you stick to the meeting duration.
• Define the agenda very clearly and stick to it.
• Clearly articulate the agenda and expected outcome while setting up the meeting.
• Set expectations if the participants are supposed to come prepared for the calls. E.g., everyone is expected to have read the RFP.
• Encourage participants to drop out of calls if they are not required
• Don't do brainstorming on calls. Let people share ideas beforehand offline. Have some email exchanges and then have focused discussions in calls.
• Have 1-1 call if you need to speak to 1 person at a time, like for individual status updates
• Use collaboration tools like shared spreadsheets, etc. more effectively for gathering status updates rather than getting everyone on call.
• Respect everyone's time

Clearly, conference calls are here to stay, at least for the duration of our professional lives. It would be wise, therefore, to inculcate some discipline in how we go about them, as it is now capable of having significant impact on organizational efficiency. Effective use of the medium can reduce stress levels in employees, while also making them more productive.

Do throw in your ideas on how conference calls can be made more effective and meaningful.

World post COVID-19

Today starts the 21 day full lockdown in India to fight the Coronavirus epidemic! Something like this was unimaginable just a few days back. But it's happening now and it's going to be like this for some time - may be weeks, may be months - hard to tell. When we come out of it, the world is definitely going to be very different from the one we know.

A lot of small businesses are going to die in this process. As the economy is going through a severe depression and as it would start it's recovery,  new businesses will start picking up. It'll be interesting to think about the potential opportunities in the world post recovery. Whoever gets it right would be generously rewarded, I am sure.

Here's my take on what are likely to be a few of the major changes we'll see in the post COVID-19 world:

1. Global delivery models will be seen with caution. A lot of businesses in the US and Europe are dependent on India and other offshore locations for managing their IT systems including the most business critical ones with severe business implications if they go down. Similarly, a lot of companies manufacture from China and a few other locations in Asia. The supply chains are complex and multi-country. A situation like now where every country is locking its borders and shutting down work places can bring businesses to standstill even if they are not headquartered or selling in an affected country. Also, for any country dependence on external factors for their own basic and essential services can be a huge risk when it is itself under lock down. One would like to have things in own control at times like these, rather than adding uncertainty to an already stressful situation.
2. Working from home will become the norm. A lot of companies have always talked about it, but dragged their feet when it came to implementing work-from-home for all their employees, even if was feasible for many of their roles. IT services companies, for example, could do it for many of their teams, but refrained even when it was doable because of considerations/reasons like complexity of management, network security, client data protection, poor trust on Indian employees, pleasing clients, old-style leadership, poor/slow/non-standard internet accesses at homes until recently, lot of already built infrastructure due to poor foresight, or plain belief that people sitting together are the most efficient and productive. While I do believe that some of these reasons are genuine, and that working from home is not the most efficient way of working, it seems like it will have to be given a higher share in future because of what the world is seeing now. The extent of the virus outbreak took everyone by surprise, businesses were hardly prepared with a proper work-from-home model. Future delivery models will therefore look more closely at companies' capabilities and preparedness in this regard.
3. Switch to robotics and fully automated operations. In spite of heavily leveraging technology in many of the new-age businesses like commutation, e-commerce, banking, etc., I realized now that they all are still heavily labor intensive. Machines and internet have either upgraded parts of their operations or enabled these businesses to start with, but a lot of activities are still done by humans. When there's an epidemic, if customers are able to get their basic needs from home, it makes the lock down meaningful and also keeps them less exposed to risk. But if humans have to run around to deliver these, we'll end up needing a huge army of people exposing themselves for the comfort of the rest. It therefore makes sense that companies immediately ramp up the testing and adoption of technologies like drones for delivery, fully automated warehouses, automated cars/trucks, and so on, which have so far been huge areas of research, yet have not been perfected and adopted because of one prime reason - jobs. But as businesses would crumble in the next few months in spite of huge demand but inability to supply or deliver, it will become imperative for companies to rethink technology investments for the future.
4. Countries have to either invest in massive skill building or have to breakdown under the tremendous pressure due to unemployment. As businesses rethink their supply chains and degree of labor-intensiveness, jobs are going to be lost in billions around the world. Labor arbitrage and large young population are no longer going to be competitive advantages. Especially in India, people need to get out of their comfort zones and get hands-on with basic engineering skills. It's an irony that we perhaps have one of the largest number of engineers in the world, but most of them are only engineers by degree and can hardly do basic stuff even in their areas of specialization. The quality of our tech workforce is pathetic on an average. Our ability to conduct research in an area and generate outcomes to help our masses is severely limited and under-invested. It's a shame we brag all we can, but in times of crisis we need to again look at western countries to come up with solutions. Mr. Modi would never have the confidence that Mr. Trump has in their respective countries' ability to come up with a vaccine for COVID-19, for example. Our world-class educational and research institutes are not even in a position to catch up with the global best. The same is true for many other countries like ours. In the new world, skill-building will not be optional. We won't be able to manage 7-8% GDP growth and brag about being one of the fastest growing economies, with half our population only capable of lifting weights, and most of the other half earning better due to labor arbitrage, though doing mediocre work. We say we have a lot of brain power, but sadly most of it is wasted because of the absence of platforms to nurture them.
5. Healthcare infrastructure and services need massive upgrade. Even in normal times, we are under-invested in healthcare and have far from sufficient medical staff. The current epidemic has exposed the weaknesses of even the developed world in this. We in India may fall into the common trap that if they are not well equipped, we are justified in being where we are with the 1.3bn population - which is the most stupid argument we often make to explain our backwardness to ourselves. Sadly we don't value human life enough, but this has to change if India were to be a leader in the new world order. And in fact, this is true for every country on this planet, as we now understand where we collectively and individually stand. It also exposes a huge business domain as severely under-represented in the economy. There is scope of millions of jobs here, but lack of the right policy framework to make it happen. I am optimistic that all countries will realize this soon, as it's already too late.

What are your thoughts on the how the future would look like?

Working from home

The Coronavirus pandemic is perhaps a once-in-life-time thing, and seeing it unfold is both scary and intriguing. Everywhere people are being asked to stay at home, to not be in groups and to keep washing hands. A few companies have asked their employees to work from home. But a large number are still pushing it down to the wire, making the employees come to office for as long as they can manage without breaking any government mandate. It's sad how businesses think - the primary rule seems to be to make money without breaking any law. And for some employees to impress their bosses by showing up in times like these coz they somehow think it'll help them get some browny points. They probably don't realize that their actions can put a lot of innocent people and their families at risk. After all, this whole thing must have started with 1 person who must have got infected by whatever the cause was. And right at this moment, there are 237,446 confirmed & reported infected individuals worldwide of which 9784 have died as per the live updates here as on 20 Mar 2020 at 1.30 AM. And we are probably just getting started, and if what is being said all over is true, we are fast approaching the situation of a lockdown in India and everyone would be forced to adhere soon.

The increasingly globalized nature of business operations these days makes it especially complex to handle situations like these. While most office-goers can still be made to sit at home and work on their laptops provided the business requirements allow them to work from home networks, the majority of the roles in companies, which are sadly under-represented on active social media, are not in position to work from home. Nor is their risk being taken into account with equal seriousness, at least initially. The elite just want to stay away from them, but still want to keep having their stuff done seamlessly like always. But viruses don't value one life over another, and epidemics like these have a way of equalizing humans in their vulnerability, although not quite in how the infected are subsequently handled.

Coming to working from home, while it is the need of the hour and must indeed be the norm right now, I do have a somewhat mixed experience with working from home in normal times, and the points below are from that perspective only.

I almost fully worked from home the past 3 years and 50% of the time for 2.5 years before that, and in general, I found it extremely frustrating especially in the last 3 years - not only because I found working from home boring in itself, but more because the company I worked for abused employees to a ridiculous extent in return for the seeming "flexibility" offered. Although there are advantages of a fully work-from-home model, the disadvantages far outnumber if you are not disciplined enough and your organization is not respectful enough of you as a human being and of your time.

Let's look at some of the pros first:

1. Saving on commutation time - with the traffic and distances these days, it's stressful spending hours commuting to office and back home. The time lost in just moving oneself from one place to another feels like a stupid waste to me, especially in cities in Mumbai, where many people spend 2-3 hours commuting each day.
2. Being available at home - Now this has many advantages. For example people with small babies can look after them with some support. Or those needed at home due to any other reason like health issues of a family member, etc.
3. Unrestricted network - Workplaces tend to put a lot of restrictions on network access assuming that if they allow employees to open certain recreational sites, their productivity will go down. It's a false assumption which I can say based on my own years of experience and also from what I have observed in my colleagues and peers.
4. Behavioral freedom - Being at home allows you to dress the way you want, sit the way you want, loosen up, grow beard or whatever... fuck grooming and enjoy being yourself.

... which are outnumbered by the cons:

1. Abuse of working hours by companies - by offering this notional flexibility, companies, especially those that work round-the-clock in different time zones, start expecting that you can be available at any time. This can often lead to extremely long working hours daily, people losing sleep and being stressed all the time. Plus it hardly leaves any free time outside work.
2. Impact on mental / psychological health - confining oneself in a room without any social interactions causes a huge mental strain which is not realized immediately but it screws with your mind very deeply.
3. Impact on physical health - sitting at one place for long hours affects the health in many ways. In my previous company there were regular sessions to educate employees about the hazards of continuous sitting, equating it with smoking a certain number of cigarettes per hour. I found it extremely disgusting to hear those lectures, given the fact that the work culture and model followed by the company left no option for the employees but to sit for many many hours at stretch looking at their screens, hearing and some times talking. Cases of obesity, diabetes, blood pressure, joint pains, back pains, neck sprains, headaches, indigestion, etc. etc. are very common among this section of people.
4. Poor relationships / networking at work place - you tend to know people only by their voices, some times pictures and in some cases videos - live or recorded; there is only so much conversation you can have on official media like calls, chats, etc., also with the huge limitations on the nature of the conversations you could have. The perceptions and opinions you develop about people based on what you gather from all this tend to be inaccurate, which you sometimes discover when you meet them on occasions. It's hard to form really meaningful professional relationships in such a context.
5. Impact on learning and skills upgrade - In my experience, the most effective learning in a workplace is through face-to-face interactions and in-person collaborations on tasks.
6. Impact on family life - Long working hours, being glued to screen, being on conference calls all the time, screen sharing most of the time, tasks and deliverables being urgent and squeezed between calls - all this makes one always engaged and less available for the family in the true sense, although physically being in the same home.
7. Poor efficiency in team work - With everyone working remotely, you tend to sync up more often and for longer. Many a times half the guys on the call are not listening but are just present in the call, for the sake of it. Most of them are simply lost or dreaming, while a few manage to focus well enough on something else and get some work done. The latter might make it seem like it's more efficient to be on call rather than meetings in person, most attendees are lost even when they are sitting together in a conference room. And the degree is significantly lower as compared to conference calls. However, it's not something very specific to working from home, as conference calls are a reality even for people sitting in office.

As you can see, I am not a huge fan of working from home when all the company wants is to suck more out of its employees and not really make their lives better or increase their productivity.

The present case, however, is forced by the government on the companies that would otherwise not care. And it's best people stay at home for as long as the calamity recedes. I wish the world comes out of this pandemic soon, we don't lose any more lives and humanity stands tall like it always does.


Update - 20 Mar 2020 09.11 PM: The COVID-19 situation has worsened since I wrote the above. The Maharashtra government has announced commercial lockdown in Mumbai and Pune. So work-from-home or total shut-down is the mandate now for companies (except for a few like manufacturing units, etc.). Stay home and stay safe. Love you all.