How to Hold Impromptu Conversations on Virtual Teams

How do you replace the short face-to-face conversations that team members in an office have on a regular basis if you’re working remotely from your colleagues? It’s easy when everyone’s in the same building to pop your head up over a cubicle and ask your neighbor a question or wander down the hall to the boss’s office and see if she has a few minutes to discuss your current project. When the team’s scattered around the globe with just the Internet to connect them, it’s harder to get together for ad hoc consultations.

Email isn’t a great replacement for these casual encounters. It may be too slow and can cause misunderstandings. Instant messaging is better, but can be an annoying and limited way of communicating.

Dave Pollard of How to Save the World suggests we rethink the use of IM in these scenarios, using it only to set up the conversation not bear the whole weight of it:

What we could do is to add to IM an ability to:

1. virtually ‘knock’, just-in-time, with an indication of how many minutes of the consultee’s time we need,
2. simply conference others into the conversation, and
3. simply add voice, video and desktop-sharing capability to the IM conversation.

Then IM, instead of having to carry the conversation, would be used mostly to set up the conversation, in a way analogous to the ‘knock on the door’ that is used to set up a face-to-face just-in-time conversation (“do you have 5 minutes to resolve a problem we’re having with…?”). Once the IM ‘knock’ was accepted, the participants would then ‘one-click’ into a VoIP conversation with video and desktop-sharing ‘attached’ to the resizeable IM pop-up window. Voilà, Bill’s virtual meeting, updated to the mobile, wireless workplace.

As Dave points out, the technology to do this already exists today. The barriers to making it succeed have to do with the humans using it. We’re comfortable with our email and instant messaging and might not be ready for regular video conversation. Plus, we don’t want to make it too easy for other people to interrupt us. Aren’t we already suffering enough from continuous partial attention?

If we can’t get IM + videoconferencing to work (or we don’t really want it to), there’s always the Giraffe video-conferencing robot to consider, though I’m not sure how I’d like having my virtual colleagues’ video heads on a stick wandering around my house.

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