For the last eight years, I’ve worked from home with occasional travel to clients’ offices. How occasional this travel has been has mostly depended on how far away the client is, and how insistent they are on seeing my face. Nevertheless, I’ve always made it a point to visit them for any important meetings, and do them in person.
Now, with the Covid-19 crisis, this hybrid model has broken down. Like most other people in the world, I work entirely from home nowadays, even for important meetings.
At the face of this, this seems like a good thing – for example, nowadays, however important a meeting is, the transaction cost is low. An hour long meeting means spending an hour for it (the time taken for prep is separate and hasn’t changed), and there’s no elaborate song-and-dance about it with travel and dressing up and all that.
While this seems far more efficient use of my time, I’m not sure I’m so happy about it. Essentially, I miss the sense of occasion. Now, an important meeting feels no different from an internal meeting with partners, or some trivial update.
Travel to and from an important meeting was a good time to mentally prepare for it, and then take stock of how it was gone. Now, until ten minutes before a meeting, I’m living my life as usual, and the natural boundaries that used to help me prep are also gone.
The other problem with remotely being there in large but important meetings is that it’s really easy to switch off. If you’re not the one who is doing a majority of the talking (or even the listening), it becomes incredibly hard to focus, and incredibly easy to get distracted elsewhere in the computer (it helps if your camera is switched off).
In a “real” physical meeting, however, large the gathering is, it is naturally easy for you to focus (and naturally more difficult to be distracted), and also easier to get involved in the meeting. An online meeting sometimes feels a bit too much like a group discussion, and without visual cues involved, it becomes really hard to butt in and make a point.
So once we are allowed to travel, and to meet, I’m pretty certain that I’ll start travelling a bit for work again. I’ll start with meetings in Bangalore (inter-city travel is likely to be painful for a very long time).
It might involve transaction cost, but a lot of the transaction cost gets recovered in terms of collateral benefits.