About the author
James P. Ware

James P. Ware is Executive Producer for Work Design Collaborative, LLC.
He writes about changing nature of work, the workplace, the workforce, and management practice on Future of Work Blog.
His organization’s goal is to foster community, conversation, and mutual learning about the future of work and the forces driving change.

This is a guest posts on using Twibes and Twitter to make friends and grow your business. If you would like to be considered for a guest post, please email adam@twibes.com with an idea for a topic.

I seem to be inundated these days with articles, blog posts, and tweets about the differences between “being there” and interacting with people remotely. There’s a growing presumption that we can all “meet” virtually with no loss of quality, creativity, or our relationships.

But there are also many, many well-meaning managers who are skeptical—who still believe that “you can’t manage ‘em if you can’t see ‘em.”

I met recently with a group of CEO’s of mid-market companies who just can’t accept the idea of flexible work programs that enable their employees to come and go as they please. The CEO’s were adamant that they needed to have their staff in one place virtually full-time “to build a common culture” and “to make sure everyone is on the same page.

And I met a CEO last year who insisted that her company’s competitive advantage came from its collaborative culture. That was in the middle of the gasoline price spike, and she was so convinced of the value of face-to-face that she was seriously considering offering her employees commuting subsidies to ensure that they would
all be in the office every day.

However, while I know there’s a lot to be said about the value of “being there,” I just don’t think it’s that simple. Yes, there are powerful arguments for face-to-face, but technology is relentlessly chipping away at the differences.

In June I posted a note on our Future of Work blog about a story in the New York Times regarding the continuing importance of face-to-face interaction (”Place Still Matters – A Lot“). That story focused largely on the places where people choose to live and base their work from, and stressed the value of being “where the action is.”

And I’d also like to call your attention to a recent article in Impact Magazine (a publication produced by OM Workspace, the contract furniture division of OfficeMax).

The article (”Face to Face: Design and Technology for Collaboration“), by Elizabeth Hockerman, explores an important but all-too-often unasked question:

Mobile technology provides untethered freedom. So why
do millions of people still partake in the dreaded rush-hour commute
to work?

The answer, of course, is that they want to be with other people (although certainly many of them probably work for organizations that expect—no, require—them to be in the office if they want to keep their jobs).

There’s still an almost-universal gut sense that face-to-face communication is much more powerful than “virtual” meetings, even with the increasingly powerful collaboration tools now available (there’s also the reality that lots of those people would work remotely at least some of the time if their employers would let them,
but that’s another story altogether).

Ms. Hockerman quoted one “expert” on the subject:

“The main reason people go to the corporate office is to be with other people,” says James Ware, executive producer of The Work Design Collaborative LLC, based in Prescott, Ariz. “There is a tremendous power in face-to-face meetings. Same-time, same-place can spark a powerful source of collaborative innovation and meaning for people.”

However, she also cites an expert on meeting rooms and collaboration technologies:

“A conference room is no longer thought of as just a meeting space within a building, but as a virtual meeting space in a limitless universe,” says Marvin Hecker, director of audio-visual design at JanCom Technologies, Inc., in Austin, Texas. “The level of technology available today can create a telepresence, where the visual and sound during a teleconference is presented in such a natural way that it is as if all participants are sitting in the same room.”

The technology to create telepresence has yet to replace face-to-face contact, but, like most technological investments, it offers organizations the possibility of increased productivity and efficiency as well as reduced costs. But remember that less time and money spent traveling to in-person meetings can only be effective if the technology can preserve the power found in human interaction.

Actually, I do believe we’re getting closer to technology that “preserves the power found in human interaction.” Most of us these days are completely comfortable with audio conference calls, which are incredibly commonplace, even though we know we don’t want them to replace all of our face-to-face interactions.

And video conferencing, using systems like HP’s Halo and Cisco’s Telepresence, while still way too expensive for home offices, are finding their way into more and more corporate facilities, some of which are available for rent to the general public on an hourly basis. As more and more people experience these technologies I’m sure the demand for them — and our general level of comfort with distributed meetings — will only grow.

Add to those particular tools web conferencing and all the social networking applications, and it’s clear we’re all becoming more used to “virtual” collaboration. Yes, there’s certainly much value in being together, and there always will be. But the more the economy becomes global and digital, the more we’re going to be communicating and collaborating with people who are far, far away.

The challenge everyone faces as we move into this new age  of “working anywhere” is learning when it’s important to be face-to-face, and when it’s not. The fact is that we have choices today that we never used to have; we have to learn how to make those
choices intelligently.

And for a final thought, don’t forget that there’s also real power in our ability today to reach out and include people in distant locations in spur-of-the-moment “meetings” via telephone and web conferencing tools – thereby enriching our conversations and brainstorming sessions with ideas and perspectives that were simply not possible to access before the Internet created a truly global community.