I wish you all the very best for the new year: happiness, health, conviviality and whatever else you may need. I hope that we all will be able to travel again and meet face to face. And that we can keep the good things we learnt this year.
This year was quite strange, for me and for most of us, I think. Working from home not sporadically but systematically. Being locked down, which is similar to locked up but not quite the same fortunately. Meeting virtually instead of face-to-face.
I feel privileged, most of all because my nearest and dearest are doing fine.
And I have an apartment with sufficient space, peace & quiet and a nice view, so my home office is not bad at all. It complements my digital workspace nicely.
Also, in my consultancy job I can work remotely. Of course, it is better to discuss things face to face, for example in workshops, training sessions, and deep dive conversations. But for me, it is definitely possible to work online.
The funny thing is that when this all started, spring 2020 in my neighbourhood, I was involved in an adoption programme to help end users make the Microsoft 365 toolkit their own. These users all had Microsoft 365 at their disposal, but they were not really using the tools, like Microsoft Teams. In some of the training sessions, participants told me that they were always working together in the same office or at the same constructions site. So why was I going on about remote collaboration?
Well, that certainly changed! All of the sudden, everyone was working remotely. Or at least, everyone who was working primarily on a computer rather than actually laying the bricks at the construction site for example.
From that point onwards, the question no longer was why you would use tools like Microsoft Teams, but how to use them. If I were a cynic, I’d say a global pandemic is the best way to make people adopt the tools for working remotely…
Yes, people still prefer face to face meetings. But I hear quite often that they do see the advantages of, for example, online meetings. For a short meeting, you can save travel time by doing it online. The chat functionality and Yammer do allow you to ask a question without interrupting your colleagues quite a much as a phone call does, or you standing at their desk. When many or even some of us work from home, there are less traffic jams, and the air gets cleaner.
So it is good to know that there are online alternatives to face to face collaboration. Now we hope that we can soon get face to face alternatives to all of this online collaboration…
Happy New Year!
The funny thing is that when this all started, spring 2020 in my neighbourhood, I was involved in an adoption programme to help end users make the Microsoft 365 toolkit their own.
These users all had Microsoft 365 at their disposal, but they were not really using the tools, like Microsoft Teams.
In some of the training sessions, participants told me that they were always working together in the same office or at the same constructions site.
So why was I going on about remote collaboration?
Well, that certainly changed!
All of the sudden, everyone was working remotely.
Or at least, everyone who was working primarily on a computer rather than actually laying the bricks at the construction site for example.
From that point onwards, the question no longer was why you would use tools like Microsoft Teams, but how to use them.
If I were a cynic, I’d say a global pandemic is the best way to make people adopt the tools for working remotely…
Comment by Dean's Tank Inc. — November 10, 2021 @ 20:04
I feel privileged, most of all because my nearest and dearest are doing fine.
And I have an apartment with sufficient space, peace & quiet and a nice view, so my home office is not bad at all. It complements my digital workspace nicely.
Also, in my consultancy job I can work remotely. Of course, it is better to discuss things face to face, for example in workshops, training sessions, and deep dive conversations. But for me, it is definitely possible to work online.
Comment by D&S Party Tents — April 19, 2022 @ 09:19