Virtual Work vs. Virtual Organizations*

Will travel stay obsolete when the pandemic ends?

Is the vision of people preferring to travel—after the pandemic—to another planet rather than to their regular offices mostly science or mostly fiction?  Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk hope the former.  What does experience suggest?

Having gone virtual since the early 1990s (with some hybrid thrown in), I know what is possible and also how virtual and "traditional" intersect. I think of the clients that over the years were (1) developed virtually, (2) contracted virtually, and (3) served virtually (often with colleagues at multiple locations—working, yes, virtually).  There have been several of these and many more where two of the stages were completely virtual. 

There were also cases like one in Australia where our firm was hired sight unseen (out of 18 bidders), and most of the work was done virtually. When it came to the final presentation, I was asked to travel to Canberra and said I would be happy to.  With an unscheduled fueling stop in Fiji, it took 36 hours to reach Canberra and deliver my 15-minute presentation. My total in-person time with our client from the first to last contact was about two hours, much of it listening to other speakers.

This is how our virtual or near-virtual cases often go.  Unlike firms who send large teams of young MBAs to a physical site, our more "gray hair" associates and I do most of the work offsite, while attending key meetings face to face (F2F).  So, will travel to work and business drop drastically when Covid dissipates?  (More than 80% of respondents to a recent survey thought they were more productive and less stressed working from home.)  Will the airlines go bust?  Will we no longer need Uber to get to the office?

All this overlooks the majority of workers in the developed world who have gone to work on a daily basis despite Covid, not to mention the billion working age individuals in the developing world, without access to Zoom, Skype or Webex.  For plugged-in office workers, on the other hand, post-Covid life is likely to be less commuter-based, though much depends on whether the work-from-homers have formed new relationships online or just Zoomed with the people they already knew and worked with.

Communications both displaces travel and instigates it.  A classic case study involved a government lab in Colorado that sent six of its managers to Washington DC each month "to coordinate."  Then a video conference room was set up at each location.  A year later the six managers rarely traveled to DC but overall travel between the lab and the DC agency had grown. The video conference rooms could accommodate 20 or more people, so more people participated in the new video-based coordination meetings, which led to more trips between Washington and Colorado than before the change.

Once new virtual contacts are made online, chances are some F2F will still be needed—to exchange certain information, seal the deal or just build the relationship.  Bottom line, pay attention to whether contacts are being expanded during the pandemic.  Working from home with the same people as before is one thing; building a virtual organization is another.   Face-to-Face and FaceTime meet somewhere in between.

* From Kas Kalba, Global Gigs—How to Find Them, Manage Them, Learn from Them.