The Year that Zoomed by

By Andrew Birch, Solution Architect at Binary Consultants

Let’s get this out of the way up-front, right now. If you told me that I never had to do another Teams (or Zoom) call ever again, I would be overjoyed. The sense of relief and elation would last for quite some months, especially if they were all to be replaced with travel and meeting people face-to-face, in-person.

Having done none of that for over a year now, doing business “the old-fashioned way” would be genuinely refreshing.

teams/Zoom Fatigue is real

Whatever you call it, six to ten hours of video calls in a day (which is the “new normal” for our little team) leaves you drained in a way that face-to-face meetings of equivalent length simply don’t.

We’ve all noticed it, and we’ve all resolved to make space in our diaries away from our webcams. Yet we open our agenda for the week ahead, only to see something like this (image blurred for privacy):

As a professional services company you’d expect our diaries to be pretty full. Our time is, after all, what we sell, so to us an empty diary is as bad as seeing a planned shift with only 30 tonnes on it. However, look closer and you’ll see how much overlap, double (or triple) booking, and back-to-back meetings there are.

Do not be fooled by the hour for lunch! This is just a buffer for morning meetings to overrun into. If I’ve learned anything in the last year or so, it’s the importance of having a “hard-stop” on Teams meetings otherwise you can simply kiss your day goodbye.

a blessing and a curse

Another thing I’ve noticed is that our clients, i.e. feed mills, have even busier schedules. And these aren’t just the regular meetings they had in-person before, but entirely new meetings made possible by the power of remote working and the fact that people can now, literally, jump from one meeting to the next without even leaving the kitchen table. I’m going to say this is both a blessing and a curse.

Starting with the pros – holding meetings virtually rather than in-person can make scheduling a lot easier as all you need to do is find a time when everyone is free, rather than a time where everyone is free and is able to get to the right place.

We saw this as a big benefit very early on when we found we could suddenly work with two or more clients in the same day, rather than scheduling a day at a time on-site. I say initially, because our diaries are just as constrained now, perhaps even more so, than we were when we were travelling to site, but I’ll get to that later.

The downside for everyone, I think, is that easier scheduling combined with far less face-to-face contact has led to more meetings overall. I’m going to shamelessly quote a line from Jurassic Park at this point which I use quite often: “Everyone was so busy wondering whether we could, no one stopped to ask whether we should …”

headsets and webcams are here to stay (for a little while at least)

People seem to be holding many more meetings, whether formal or informal, via Teams and Zoom. And I suspect many wouldn’t happen if it wasn’t quite so easy for everyone to attend (on the assumption that they definitely won’t be anywhere else but the kitchen table).

This, I think, will be a largely self-solving problem.

When the world does finally start to open up again and restrictions are eased, scheduling will once again become more difficult, and those less crucial Teams/Zoom meetings will quickly die away, probably to be replaced by the kind of interaction we had before all this started.

What I think we will be left with is a new way to meet “when it makes sense”. This might mean, for example, that the monthly sales meeting no longer requires reps to take a day out to drive to the office (saving time and travel costs). I’m sure there will still be plenty of in-person meetings, however, we’ve now realised that things can be done differently. I don’t think for a minute that the headsets and webcams are going to be permanently consigned to the cupboards any time soon.

good news for the environment

In March last year we saw an urgent desire amongst our customers to remove dependence on paper in processes; this was, quite obviously, because the paper was no longer in the same place as the people trying to process it!

I’m very pleased to say that the trend has continued and, if anything, is gathering pace. Across the industry people are looking

for ways to transact without paper. From text message notifications to email invoicing, customer portals to complex EDI integrations, the aim is the same: eliminate the paper.

Whilst this is pretty good news for the environment (less good news for printer manufacturers and the postal service) it’s also driving a process change that I have been trying (with varying levels of success) my whole career to effect – moving from handling everything to handling exceptions.

In simple terms, when there was a pile of paper delivery notes to process, you worked through the pile and checked each one. If 80% of them had updated correctly through a link with process control, there was nothing more to be done and you swiftly picked up the next piece of paper and moved on. Whilst implementing new systems like these, we often try to suggest finding a way for the system to identify “just the ones that might need attention” and “just check those” rather than all of them.

management by exception

I will say that over the years this idea has been met with reactions ranging from genuine interest through to polite humouring, and occasional outrage at my ridiculousness! Not check every one!?! He must be mad.

In defence of the sceptics, computers have been known to make mistakes, and as an industry, the feed sector in particular takes great pride in ensuring that their customers are well-served and given accurate and timely information. However, the benefits of moving to managing by exception are clear and, moreover, lend themselves well to remote working.

In the last year there has been considerable focus on building list pages, dashboards, workspaces – call them what you will – basically a list of things that need human attention, identified and compiled by a system. And of all the things the last 18 months has brought, this is one that needs to stay.

A shift to exception management isn’t only positive when working remotely, it is hugely beneficial from a process perspective. Put simply, managing the exceptions takes less time which, once saved, can be used for other things (like Teams/Zoom calls).

This isn’t a new idea of course, every system implementation ever sold has always claimed to increase efficiency, save time, etc. but in this case, I think it will, a) be genuinely true; and b) apply to almost all companies whether they have implemented new software or not. The point is that the pandemic has forced us all to find new ways of working. Some are woefully less efficient, unpleasant and will go away the moment rules allow; but others (those that actually proved to be an improvement) are here to stay.

As an example, we’ve seen a marked shift from requests to change printed documents, to requests for on-screen forms and lists to change instead. People are thinking differently, working differently and now, planning differently.

What I think we’ll see, when we return to normal, is some genuine capacity created by process changes made out of necessity during the pandemic. These efficiencies might allow increased volumes with the same teams or make more flexible working possible where it wasn’t before.

While we’re talking about the return to normal, I’m hearing from some mills that remote working is here to stay. Not at the same levels as today of course, but jobs people thought impossible from home are now being done there, quite effectively too. It’s a viable alternative for employers and employees alike.

Fully remote go-lives

Will any of these technology and process changes replace those personal relationships so crucial to the feed milling world? I sincerely hope not, and to explain why, let me share our experience of putting two feed mills live at the same time, remotely, as well as one project we began in April 2020 that will be live (all being well) by the time you read this.

Last summer, as restrictions eased, it was clear that whilst we were no longer under a full lockdown, things were definitely not back to normal. Roche’s Feeds in Ireland and Moore’s Animal Feeds in Northern Ireland were both delayed pending government announcements about when we could travel over and manage the training and go-lives. When it became clear that wasn’t happening any time soon, we began planning to complete the projects entirely remotely. For our business, this was the first real disruption to business as usual.

Before 2020 we already worked from home and held remote meetings, but we’d never taken a project live without being on-site. Once again there were pros and cons. Training, we quickly realised, could not be done in groups, because we needed to see users’ screens to guide them through the process. This meant that training was done one-on-one, which was better for the user (good) but took considerably longer (not so good).

Another advantage of remote meetings is the ability to record them, which really came in handy during training. I’m pleased to report that both projects went live with minimal disruption to their businesses thanks to a herculean effort by their teams. Rather than a team of experienced software people on-site to supplement and support their internal team during the frenetic change-over period, they actually had to take on more work in areas like IT and integrations to effectively be our eyes, ears and hands on-site.

Together we found a way through and, emboldened by success, we are planning to go-live with Lakeland Agri in May 2021 having not stepped foot on site since the project began. And it’s at this point we can explore those all-important personal relationships.

building a project team exclusively online is tough

Whilst it is possible to configure software, analyse requirements and train processes via Teams, it is not possible to form the same relationships that you’d build in person. We were exceptionally lucky

with Lakeland in that one of our team had worked with them for years and already had those relationships, and that our whole team had worked with their project manager before.

But in October 2020 we started a new project in a new industry with a new client, and that’s where we really found the limitations of Teams, and it has nothing to do with the product itself. Building a project team exclusively online is tough, and if we had any choice, we wouldn’t do it. You can organise as many socials or quizzes or getting-to-know-you sessions as you like on Teams or Zoom but, it isn’t a substitute for five minutes making coffee together.

Similarly, no Teams meeting can replicate the experience of just sitting side-by-side with someone you’re getting to know and just asking the odd question or quickly showing each other something on your screen. When on-site we might not have had a specific session with a user but simply sat at the same bank of desks for the day. There would have been interaction, knowledge sharing, we would have got to know each other without really trying.

Now, imagine the equivalent idea on Teams – start a call that lasts the whole day and just sit there, working away quietly on the task at hand, while the other person does the same, with video and audio on. Now stop imagining it because it’s never going to happen!

It would, in short, be awful and we quite rightly haven’t even tried it. But it’s something we know we’re missing. Don’t get me wrong, it’s going well and we’re working effectively together, and the project is on-track; but it’s not the same, no matter how convenient or costsaving the remote model is, we wouldn’t choose it as the sole method of delivering a project.

the way we work has changed forever

At Binary, we already know the experiences of the last 12 months will change the way we work forever.

We think that rather than travelling for a few days every week, on-site visits will be longer, followed by periods of remote working. This will (hopefully) give our customers better access to our team (the flexibility of remote working) whilst giving our staff a better work-lifetravel balance than they had before the pandemic hit.

But the important point is that the future will contain both ways of working; a blend of old and new. There are things we know are best done on-site and things that we know are better done remotely, whereas previously the assumption was that almost everything was better done on-site.

The result will be lower costs for our clients, less disruption to the home lives of our staff, less time spent travelling and a lower carbon footprint.

There will be no resistance or hesitation from our team to travel but also no automatic assumption that every meeting must be inperson.

And it’s this new-found balance that I think will be a lasting and positive legacy of the year that Zoomed by.

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