I’ve been having conference calls that end up resulting in additional conference calls to discuss the findings of the previous conference call, and then having more conference calls that are required with another group of people because some folks got left out of the loop either purposely or accidentally and then we have to entirely or partially re-cap them… with another conference call.

It doesn’t matter if 20 email chains go back and forth that summarize the calls, the conferences never seem to end. Effectively, each successive conference call turns into a partial repeat of the one before it, resulting in a vicious cycle of “Groundhog Day” all week long.

Do you know how I realize that conference calls are becoming a serious problem? I have three VOIP handsets that I have dedicated to my business line. It’s not unusual for me to completely chain-smoke the charging on all three handsets for a 10 or 12 hour workday, of which 70 to 80 percent of that day is dedicated to conference calls.

And it’s not just Perlow who is experiencing conference call issues. As director of business development at the Acumen Fund, Sacha Dichter is pretty far removed from the world of IT, but he has a similar complaint to Perlow — conference calls can really suck. Dichter diagnosis many of his calls as suffering from “telephonitis,” which he described as “the process whereby otherwise conversant, engaged, active people become silent in the face of a group conference call.” To fight the dread condition, Dichter offers a number of tips including:

When silence starts to set in, start cold calling people. This has two effects: making sure you’re hearing from people, and creating an incentive (for those who don’t like being called on) for people to speak up when they have something to say.

Never equate silence with agreement. It’s bad enough to do this in person. Worse still on the phone.

Marketing guru and author Seth Godin has experienced the telephonitis phenomenon as well, but he offers a different solution –- using chat in parallel with voice calls (he recommends Campfire), which he says offers three advantages:

When you put text chat in parallel with a voice conference call, magical things happen. The first is that everyone participates. If you don’t, it’s noticeable and you won’t be invited back.

Second, the voice part of the call acts as a narrative for the chat part, allowing people to highlight or respond to what’s being said.

Most of all, it creates organized, trackable chaos, which was the reason for the meeting in the first place.

In a previous WebWorkerDaily Tales from the Trenches posts, Orange Business Services’ Mark Fitzpatrick said his team had great success with Godin’s parallel chat technique. Keeping a chat log of calls and reactions to what’s been said is also one possible solution to Perlow’s complaint about time-wasting “catch-up” conference calls, allowing those that missed earlier information to read up on what they missed rather than being told over yet another call.

How does your team battle telephonitis and conference call overload?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Editor B, CC 2.0.

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Mark Fitzpatrick, the head of workplace development at Orange Business Services, knows this well. He has put together a team of internal candidates from the best and brightest Orange has to offer. The result is a team spread from Dallas to Delhi, some working in Orange offices and some entirely from home. How does he manage to coordinate a group of talent spread across nearly every time zone? WebWorkerDaily spoke with him to find out.

Talent

The flexibility provided by remote work tools allows Fitzpatrick to source the best niche talent. The  result is a globally dispersed team with a powerful set of skills. “There was no design to create a remote team,” he explains. “We were looking for some pretty unique combinations of skill sets; for example, a person with a great deal of real estate and telecom experience. If that particular rare animal shows up in a city that you really didn’t have in mind, then you’re choosing the person, not necessarily the location.”

The global reach of his team’s work also means that even if he had hired his next-door neighbor, that co-located worker would soon be handling projects around the world. “The guy in Dallas, for example, has been the primary project manager for our major service center in Cairo,” Fitzpatrick says. “We’re only going to run one of these projects in Cairo about once every two or three years, so we’re certainly not going to try and source someone in the Middle East when that person would end up having to manage another project in Petrópolis, Brazil. “

Being blind to distance has helped Fitzpatrick build an exceptional team, but the variety of time zones is also a hurdle. Old-fashioned flexibility is key. “Someone has to suffer and do a two a.m. conference call,” he says. Also, the team has learned to be mindful about decision making. Fitzpatrick is based in Europe but has an employee in Sydney. “We couldn’t be much farther away,” he explains. “If he has to get my approval, then it can add a day, and if I have a question for him, that costs us a day. So we don’t ask each other ping-pong questions that take a whole week that, if we were in the same time zone, would have taken minutes. You have to plan when and where the decision is going to be made, who has to be involved, and minimize that.”

Tools

Different situations call for different tools, according to Fitzpatrick. If “it’s a non-real-time decision you want documented, then email it is.” But his team is also finding some “interesting combos,” including audio conferencing plus instant messaging, very useful.

“The thing about audio conferencing is, you can set a date and then everybody has agreed to a decision time frame. But once you get these players involved, they use instant messaging during the audio call,“ he says. “You can have the conversation outside of the conversation. Everybody is listening to what the speaker is saying, but underneath they’re writing each other instant messages and building agreements. They’re rapidly forming little subcommittees and building up to the decision, so the decisions happen faster. That combination is becoming vital to the way we make decisions.”

This sort of thing, Fitzpatrick adds, works less well with video conferencing. “What we found is a 10-minute subject on audio conference should be moved to more like 20 minutes on telepresence. The additional time was created by the fact that everybody’s fully engaged, so you are going to get more input. But also, the informal agreements haven’t really happened, so people are trying to determine in that slow way that we do in face-to-face communication.”

Tips

Having managed co-located teams previously, Fitzpatrick has noticed one big difference with his current distributed team. “When there’s the ability to bring multiple people into the same room, it’s not so much your relationship with the employees, it’s their relationships with each other. Whereas when everything goes remote, there is more of a hub-and-spoke kind of relationship. I sometimes feel like everyone has a relationship with me that is stronger than their relationships with each other.”

To encourage interrelationships among team members, Fitzpatrick has learned to “delegate and walk away. They tend to develop their own relationships that way.” He’s also learned that building team cohesion takes a conscious effort from him in the form of a simple behavior change. “I became much more mindful of my instant message status,” he says. “At the coffee cooler, you see the person. You know that they’re not occupied, but when you’ve got a telephone, there’s no way to know, so use instant message to say, ‘Yeah, I’m available.’ It’s really important to turn your status to green even though you’re super busy.”

Fitzpatrick also notes sociological research showing that “the old expression ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ is actually completely wrong.” Reduce your contact with someone to less than ten times per year and science says it will changes your relationship. “I believe it’s called Dunbar’s number,” he says. “We can all keep about 150 relationships close, but once you get beyond 150, relationships start to fall apart. So if you’re going to be one of the 150 with your team, frequency matters.” A recurring meeting in Outlook makes sure he has regular one-on-one meetings with all his employees where they can discuss any issue on their mind.

Image courtesy Flickr user VanDammeMaarten.be

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Like its desktop cousin, the new iOS app, named VoxOx Call, attempts to bring together the features of many other products. At first glance, it looks most like Google Voice. New users can select a free U.S. number, or purchase a low-cost number in Canada (something Google Voice doesn’t offer); number porting is coming.

Surprisingly, VoxOx Call doesn’t make calls using VoIP. Instead, it’s a callback service that connects both parties using standard lines. The provider explains its decision this way:

“Most VoIP calling apps rely heavily on a user’s bandwidth, which can quickly deplete a mobile data plan or result in unreliable call quality. The VoxOx Call app utilizes the traditional telephone network to initiate a call, but does so at VoxOx’s cheap worldwide calling rates, ensuring low cost and reliability. A user simply dials a contact’s phone number, and then waits for their phone to ring with that person on the line. Instead of the call being routed as an outbound call for which a mobile carrier may charge toll fees, VoxOx turns it into an inbound call, which in most countries is toll free. This allows a mobile user to pay only pennies per minute for long-distance and international calls via VoxOx rates instead of dollars per minute through their mobile carrier.”

Whether this system makes sense for you will depend on what kind of phone and data plans you have. An interesting side-effect of this procedure, though, is that the app can be used even on iPod touches and iPads, since you can set the app to call you on any number, including non-iPhone cell phones and landlines in your vicinity.

Like Google Voice, VoxOx offers transcriptions of voice messages, and these can be viewed in the iOS app. I haven’t tested it enough to evaluate how accurate the transcriptions are; Kevin Hertz, CTO at Telcentris (the company behind VoxOx), claims 80-90 percent accuracy.

In addition to international calling, VoxOx offers worldwide SMS. VoxOx has aimed to make text conversations as seamless as possible. If the person you’re conversing with leaves their office during a chat, it’s possible to switch between, say, their IM account and SMS on their cell phone. The app also has a simple way of emailing chat transcripts.

The iOS app offers several advanced features, including the ability to record calls, transfer between devices in the middle of a conversation, and arrange conferences of up to 20 people. Users can set up call forwarding to multiple phone numbers. VoxOx Call users can also receive, view and forward incoming faxes, change outgoing caller ID on the fly. It offers push notifications, too.

VoxOx Call doesn’t have quite as many features as the desktop version, though, and while it’s possible to sign up for a VoxOx account from the mobile app, VoxOx Call is intended to work in concert with the desktop software. There are a number of functions that can’t be accessed from the iOS app; even simple things such as adding an IM account aren’t available. Also, Skype integration seems to be missing, apparently because Skype requires its own software to be running in order for other programs to access it.

On the other hand, the iOS app has something the desktop application doesn’t: integration with the device’s address book.

During my conversation with Kevin Hertz, I asked him about some of the issues that caused me to be skeptical about the Mac version of the desktop app when I looked at it a few months ago. I’d been disappointed by its “un-Mac-like” appearance and poor font rendering, which made it unappealing to use. I had been surprised by its lack of connections to the Mac address book, or even a system for importing contacts. I was unhappy with its inconsistent support for such standards as oAuth and Facebook Connect. And I had also been annoyed by the tendency of VoxOx to default to an “invite your friends to use this” setting. Hertz assures me that all these issues will be addressed in updates to the desktop application.

VoxOx remains a promising, but flawed, product. The initial release of VoxOx Call for iOS will definitely appeal to those who do a lot of international calling and texting; its limited features and reliance on callbacks will make it less compelling for the rest of us.

VoxOx offers a number of calling and texting plans. You may also pay as you go. The VoxOx Call app is free (iTunes link).

Do you use VoxOx? How do you manage your mobile communications?

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Adium, the open-source multi-protocol instant messaging client for Mac OS X, which is well-liked by a number of our writers, has been updated to version 1.4. I’ve been using it in beta for what seems like an eternity, but the delay in its release is hardly surprising, given the huge number of new features included in the new version.

In addition to support for pretty much every instant messaging system on the planet, including IRC (which I don’t use) and several protocols I’d never heard of, Adium now supports one or more Twitter accounts. Twitter integration is interesting, as when a new tweet from someone you’re following is added, a popup window appears, just as if you’d gotten a new IM. Frankly, I follow enough people that I find the constant popups annoying. But if you have enough screen room, or are using Spaces, you could leave the window open all of the time.

I find Adium’s implementation of Facebook Chat to be very helpful, especially since it allows me to review past conversations through Adium’s chat transcripts; something that I don’t believe can be done through Facebook’s own system.

Adium’s real strength is its integration with Mac OS X, including the Address Book. It continues to support Growl notifications, and an extensive list of themes and add-ons, so you can customize the program in lots of ways.

Adium has also improved its group chat function, which is very useful since I find it to be an excellent tool for collaborating with my colleagues, including those who use Pidgin or other IM clients on their PCs.

Let us know what you think of the new Adium below.

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The study got me thinking about my own IM habits, and upon reflection, I realized that my experience was in line with its findings. A few years ago, I used IM nearly constantly, but nowadays, I mainly use Facebook and Twitter to keep up to date with my friends, using IM almost solely for work. And given the number of excellent collaboration tools now available, I don’t even use IM at work as much as I once did.

Interestingly, the study points out that while IM usage has declined, email usage has remained steady, accounting for around 7 percent of online time. Such a finding also corresponds with my own experience (and if you’d like to read more on why email’s sticking around for a while yet, see my post “Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated” (sub. req.) on GigaOM Pro).

But I’m wondering about the wider WWD readership: Has your IM usage dropped in the past few years, and if so, why?

Photo courtesy Flickr user somegeekintn, licensed under CC-BY-20

VoxOx wants to take multi-system communication several steps further. In addition to the various IM protocols, it supports social networks (Facebook, MySpace and Twitter); SMS texting; faxing; private email; file sharing; video conversations; and voice connections. VoxOx also supports Skype messaging, although you have to have the Skype software running, which sort of defeats its purpose.

When you sign up for the service, you are assigned a telephone number in southern California (other locations are apparently on the way). Incoming calls to that number, and voice conversations between you and other VoxOx users, are free; other calls are charged at rates similar to other VoIP services. VoxOx has just begun offering flat-fee voice and texting plans, at prices it claims are significantly cheaper than Skype’s. VoxOx’s other services are free.

In recent days, VoxOx has released beta 2.0.5. The software has improved since I first tried it a year or so ago, but it is very definitely still a work in progress. Its dark background with white text theme is hard on the eyes and isn’t editable, and its contact manager has no provision for importing from or syncing with other address books.

VoxOx seems to be trying to collect the useful features from Skype, conferencing services, virtual PBX services, instant messaging and file sharing services, and putting them all in one place. It’s a pretty cool idea, and VoxOx is definitely worth trying, but I’m not quite ready to make it part of my daily workflow yet.

Have you used VoxOx? What did you think of it?

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And that’s not to mention just walking down the hall to talk to someone in person, which is not an option for a lot of web workers.

So, given all the choices: which ones do you actually use to communicate with friends, family, clients, and co-workers? And how do you decide? Is it technical superiority, multi-platform availability, installed base, or something else? Do you find different chat tools work better for different tasks or types of conversations? Or are you firmly stuck in a model where realtime chat wastes your time, and you settle for email, or picking up the telephone when you really need to talk to someone?

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1. Get a Unified Client. Assuming that you have contacts spread across multiple services (as most of us do), the first thing to do is to get a unified client to cut down on the number of applications that you have to run at one time. This also gets rid of time spent flipping through interfaces, trying to remember whether Jane was on MSN or GTalk. I’m using Adium (OS X only) at the moment; in the past, I’ve had success with Trillian or Miranda on Windows as well. These solutions aren’t ideal – I’d love to find something that aggregates all the chats I’m in – but they help.

2. Shove it Off to the Side: Unless chatting is your business, you need to put the chat windows somewhere that they won’t obscure whatever code or other project you’re actually working on. I run all of my communication applications on my laptop, which sits off to the side of my desktop monitors. That puts them close at hand, but ensures that they don’t overlap whatever I’m trying to see. I’m seriously considering adding a second monitor to the laptop to get more pixels for chat windows. If you don’t have a second computer, consider putting the chat windows on their own monitor, or at least a second workspace.

3. Set up Attention Flags: Particularly if you’re monitoring chat rooms, you probably don’t need to watch every message flow by. I’ve found it helpful to use software (like Conversation for IRC, or the Growl notification Greasemonkey script for Campfire, that can make a noise when my name (or a keyword) is mentioned.

4. Keep Logs: Disk space is cheap. Time spent trying to remember what was said, or embarrassment in having to ask contacts to repeat themselves, is expensive. Accordingly, I make sure to use clients that can log everything – and keep the logs. Surprisingly often I find myself searching these for a tip, URL, or action item.

I don’t claim to have the perfect strategy, but doing these things helps me keep up an active bunch of online communications while still managing to write code. What tips do you have to add for online conversation management?

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How can we reconcile its usefulness as a communication tool with the fact that it can be downright annoying?

Using one interface

Having MSN messenger, Yahoo!Messenger, and GTalk open all at the same time can be a bit confusing, or even a complete eyesore (as you can see from the image below).  If you don’t like having too many windows open, you’ll benefit from having just one interface for all your IM accounts.  Programs such as Trillian, Pidgin, and Miranda accomplish this simply.  The one-interface approach can also make archiving conversations much easier.

Tweak your IM client’s settings

Being available via instant messaging is like having the phone ring constantly – just like Melanie said – but only if you don’t change your IM client’s settings.  Find the settings or options menu of your chosen IM program and be ruthless about how you’re notified of incoming messages.  This, of course, will depend on your own preferences.  Personally, I prefer to have no audio notifications, no blinking, and incoming messages don’t launch on top of other windows.  If I want to check for IM messages, I just glance at the Windows taskbar when I welcome such distractions.  But that approach is just for me.  Find what works for you.

One other thing I do is customize my visibility.  Many IM programs will allow you to be “invisible” to different contacts or contact groups when you come online.   You can also be invisible to clients who rarely IM you anyway, and leave yourself visible for a few clients whose projects are more urgent.  Taking advantage of your visibility settings can also come in handy if you use the same IM accounts for both personal and business contacts.

Know your sacred working hours

There are some online tasks you can do that allow for a bit of distraction, such as writing a short email to your mom, commenting on other blogs, or reading your feeds.  There are also tasks that require nothing less than your full attention, especially when you’re doing The Work.  You know, the thing you are mostly paid to do.  It’s often the descriptive text under your name on your business card.

When you’re doing The Work, the rule is simple: don’t be available for IM.  Block out your working hours and let your clients know about it.  It’s likely that they’ll appreciate that you’re taking their projects seriously enough to block out sacred time for them.

Having maximum IM hours

It’s also very important to let clients know that they have a maximum number IM consultation hours with you.  Since I have few clients who need me for back and forth IM, I put a maximum of 4 hours a week for clients with heavy projects (complete web design and web content) and 2 hours a week for clients with lighter projects.

The funny thing is, when I implemented these maximum hours, the clients who used to take up several hours of my day chatting with me changed their behavior.  They didn’t even reach their weekly limit.  In fact, they seemed to have a preference for email when they realized how non-urgent most of their requests were in the first place.  I guess putting a limit in place allowed them to also prioritize their time as much as I did mine.  I was very satisfied with how things changed because of this system that I added a clause for the maximum IM hours in my new contracts, so that clients are aware of it in the beginning.

Getting someone else to do the talking

If you happen to be a web working rockstar and you really can’t handle all the IM requests, you can hire someone else to do it.  Of course, this option is complex and requires a lot of time, money, and effort to implement.  Plus, your clients might not welcome the idea of talking to someone else, especially if they’re so used to communicating with you.  Consider this method only when you’re more of a big business owner rather than a freelancer.

Instant messaging doesn’t have to be a pain, you just need to know how to use it well within your working style.  After all, we should adjust our web working tools to fit into our own work processes, and not the other way around.

Do you have any IM tips and tricks?  What do you do to prevent it from interfering with your workflow?

Photo Credit: Image by Celine Roque

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We all have our own preferences when it comes to communicating with others. I prefer email for general communication, instant messaging for answering quick questions, and my land line for long, personal conversations.

But not all people understand this – especially if they aren’t web workers. In fact, before I had a system in place, I felt like a doctor who was on call 24 hours a day. The good news is that there are some things we can do to get people to reach us through the channels we prefer.

Don’t provide excuses for others. When others are intruding on your working hours, it’s important that you don’t excuse them for it. “Yes, it’s perfectly alright that you called while I’m in the middle of work, after all, it’s normal for you to assume I’m not busy because I’m home all the time.” In a way, that’s what you’re saying when you allow others to interrupt you during what should be sacred working time.

Set barriers in place. Answering machines, voice mail, and virtual assistants prove to be effective barriers during the time you should be working. They can be used to filter incoming communication, allowing you to schedule return calls according to your needs.

Since my cellphone is used for non-urgent personal communication, so I usually leave it on silent mode unless I’m expecting to meet up with friends or family. This allows me to work during the day without being distracted by forwarded text messages or friends who only want to ask “What’s up?” I only respond to these messages when I’m done with work.

Another barrier you could use is to set up a schedule. I have someone who responds to urgent customer support, but clients who want to discuss something with me directly will have to wait a couple of hours for a scheduled chat. This prevents overeager clients from eating up all your work hours with customer service alone. Don’t get me wrong – you need to be there when your clients need you. But how can you do the work you’re paid to do if you spend most of your waking hours talking about the work rather than doing it?

Have separate channels for work and your personal life. Since most of my clients are from different continents, I tend to communicate with them mostly via a work email address, Skype, and instant messaging. My cellphone and land line are for family and friends only, making it easier to avoid personal calls when I want to work.

Some people even have two different phones for business and personal use. Having separate channels is useful because when it’s time for business, you can shut down your personal lines to prevent unnecessary interruptions. Conversely, if you’re having dinner with friends, you don’t want to pick up a business call in the middle of the meal.

Encourage compliance. My mother used to be a heavy email forwarder. She would send me several chain letters and PowerPoint presentations daily, making me waste over an hour each week selecting and deleting her emails. As an Inbox Zero practitioner, this annoyed me. Instead of accepting my situation as it is, I told her (tactfully, of course) how her mindless forwarding made me feel. She doesn’t send those messages anymore.

Tim Ferriss has another approach when it comes to email. He recommends checking your email only twice a day and setting up an autoresponder that tells people your email-checking schedule, estimated time/day of reply, and how to reach you for emergencies. For him, this prevents you from receiving those “Did you get my email?” messages.

If you implement your communication channels well, your friends, family, and colleagues will have no choice but to stick to it. My relatives seem to have given up randomly calling me during the day, and my friends don’t expect me to respond to their text messages immediately.

Don’t forget to adjust to others yourself. Of course, when you’re the recipient of messages and phone calls, people must respect your system. Keep in mind that other people out there have their own systems that you should follow if you want to contact them.

Do you have a streamlined way of receiving communication from others? Has it worked for you? What are the challenges of being available 24/7 via multiple channels such as email, blogs, and mobile phones?

Image by Per Hardestam from sxc.hu

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