What's a face-to-face good for, after all?
If all collaboration can happen productively online and most of it asynchronously, what good is a face-to-face (F2F) interaction? I have some strong opinions.
- Overcoming timezones is a good reason to travel, but not a good enough reason to meet F2F.
- There's a significant cost to F2F meetings. Productivity and efficiency aren't big enough reasons to justify this cost.
- The true value of F2F, is in building strong, lasting relationships. This is something that can happen remotely, but it takes a long time.
- You need to avoid the trap to avoid "looking productive" and making the office an anodyne venue for an otherwise vibrant purpose.
This post is a bit out of turn. If I publish the book, then this topic may not appear in the same order as you’re reading it on the website. That is true for most articles here, but more true for this one. The purpose of this website is as much to scratch my itch to share ideas in my head as it is to provide an early preview of the book’s content. So I hope you, dear reader, will bear with me as I take a detour today. That detour is about face-to-face interactions. No, not the Zoom or Teams variety. I’m talking about classic, face-to-face interactions in the same physical space. The pandemic taught us that if you’re a knowledge worker, you can perform every part of your job remotely. In fact, in most cases, you can work more productively when you’re remote. If you’re holding out against this phenomenon, I urge you to follow Jose Barrero, Nick Bloom and Steve Davis’s research on the topic. With each passing month, not only do people want to work remotely more often, they’re also getting more done with this arrangement. Then again, if you’re on this site, you’re more likely a believer than a naysayer, so I’m going to stop preaching to the choir.
Ok, so let’s get back to the point. If working remotely is more productive, what’s face-to-face (F2F) good for anymore? In today’s post, I want to explore that question in some depth. I have strong opinions; so don’t get all bent out of shape when you read this. We can debate this if you like, and I’m for nuanced, well thought out perspectives, even if they contradict my own.
I acknowledge that you can’t do without meaningful, synchronous interactions. After all, “going async” means that you understand the value you get from both async and sync communication. You need to balance the trade-offs. F2F interactions are, after all, synchronous interactions. They’re just a very special kind of synchronous interaction. Now that you understand the trade-offs, let’s discuss how you can get value from these interactions.
The time-zone question
The beauty of asynchronous work is that it transcends time zones. As you perfect the baton-pass across different people, it doesn’t matter where they work from. That’s for day to day work. When on balance, you decide you need to synchronise; you run into problems. The conspiracy of geography, physics, culture and the limits of the human body, mean that finding a common time to work together can be difficult. Ask Indian consultants like me who work primarily with customers in North America!
Travelling to the same time-zone, can make time-boxed, synchronous collaboration a lot easier than when you’re all working from different places. Well, if you’re already travelling, then why not work face-to-face? That brings me to my next point.
Face-to-face collaboration isn’t for free
It should be obvious, but let me say it, anyway. There’s a reason people don’t want to commute to the office. There’s a cost to our personal lives and a cost to productivity as well. So just because people are in the same time-zone doesn’t mean you need to uproot everyone and bring them F2F. You need to be intentional about this. What are you trying to achieve with F2F that you can’t achieve otherwise?
I mentioned this earlier in the article, but let me be rather blunt about it. In most situations that need synchronous collaboration, you can be far more effective online than in a F2F setting. If you think that’s untrue, then I’m afraid you may need to improve your own facilitation skills and your awareness of modern tools. Better still, employ a skilled facilitator who knows how to utilise these tools. I’ve run complex workshops for 100 odd people in an online setting and there’s no chance that I’ll be able to do something similar in a F2F setup with such ease.
Productivity and efficiency are not good enough reasons to meet F2F. If you still want to try being productive face-to-face, then let me throw one more thought your way. Meetings don’t get a free pass just because you’re F2F for a short while. They’re still the last resort and you still need to follow best practice. Use the ConveRel quadrants. Prepare well. Limit the attendees at each meeting. Treat everyone as if they were remote. Use modern tools. Document the meetings for everyone’s benefit. Your discipline is as bad as the last time you broke it.
Ok then. If I still have your attention, I haven’t yet answered the question. Why meet face-to-face?
The true value of being face-to-face
You can build friendships and camaraderie online. I might give away my age as I write this, but many generations back when I was a kid, we had this concept of pen-pals. We’d forge friendships just on the strength of writing letters to unknown people in another part of the world. It was slow, but it worked. Remember the value of being synchronous, though? You can be connected and you can do that at speed. F2F interactions enhance that sense of connection in a way that Zoom camera feeds can’t. There’s no better way to characterise this than by the term ‘simcha’ - a word Rabbi Jonathan Sacks popularised. This is what he says;
“Simcha, by contrast, is not a private emotion. It means happiness shared. It is a social state, a predicate of ‘we,’ not ‘I.’ There is no such thing as feeling simcha alone.”
If you dig deep down, think about the deepest relationships you have. Your BFF, your mates on a sports team, the people you visited even when the pandemic was raging on. You forged these relationships face-to-face. There lies the power of such interactions. And yet, we undermine that power.
Finding a dollar value for camaraderie
These days F2F interactions are so expensive in terms of relative dollar value (travel, hotels, etc) and the clear cost to people’s lives (commute, time away from family, stress) that there’s an implicit need to make them seem “productive”. What’ll the bosses say? So while we justify to each other that we need F2F interactions to build camaraderie, we create several obstacles to achieve that goal.
Before you know it, your face-to-face meeting becomes packed with presentations and workshops as if there’s no tomorrow. You don’t even stop to think if all this is at all necessary. You want to “make the most of our time together”. Stop. Pause for a moment. You don’t need to play to the galleries here. There’s a dollar value for camaraderie - if your employers don’t see it now, they’ll suffer it in the future. Data from Gallup shows this clearly.
“Our research has repeatedly shown a concrete link between having a best friend at work and the amount of effort employees expend in their job. For example, women who strongly agree they have a best friend at work are more than twice as likely to be engaged (63%) compared with the women who say otherwise (29%).”
We need to resist the urge to “look productive”. You can be far more productive when you’re remote. Meet to build relationships instead.
Avoid the “onsite-offsite”
I hope I’ve made a case for you to think hard about the value you’re seeking from your F2F interactions. Indulge me for a short while longer. You may remember the term “offsite”. We used it to refer to team gatherings outside the office. In recent months and years, because of budgetary constraints or to preserve the relevance of offices, I see these off-sites are now “onsite”; i.e. in the office. Some inspiration comes from the big Silicon Valley tech firms who’ve invested in many comforts to keep their employees at work for longer. Companies like Infosys own quasi-hotels to make the “onsite-offsite” work. I admit their campuses can feel like amusement parks after a while. Salesforce has built its own ranch in the Redwoods to help employees discover the “spontaneity and joy” of in-person interactions.
If you’re one of those companies, I’ll grudgingly admit that you could meet at your company premises. However, if you’re like the rest of us, think about the value you can get by detaching yourself from a place of work. The office is the most anodyne place to meet, given all the options you now have available. Go camping together. Stay in a wildlife sanctuary for a night. Plan a hike for everyone. Meet for lunch. Go bowling or bungee jumping. Actually, don’t go bungee jumping; I’m sorry I suggested that. There are dozens of options other than the office if you’re open to them. Optimise for fun and bonding. And yes, there’s a dollar value to fun as well.
Organisations that pride themselves on remote work are conscious about meeting up regularly. Check out Doist or Automattic. GitLab works with the Cowork experience to organise their off-sites. Yours truly has organised two company-wide retreats for Thoughtworks - check out the highlights reel above. You need F2F time. I know, though, that you need to give them a good, hard thought and that you need to prioritise camaraderie, bonding and fun. What do you think? Let me know in the comments.