Telecommuting makes it easier for many of us to achieve a more harmonious work-life balance. For some that means working for companies and clients outside the area while enjoying the quality of life Central Oregon offers. For others, it can be as simple as not being quite so tied to our local offices; companies are increasingly tolerant of people working from home occasionally, and being sick with a cold or flu, while annoying, doesn’t necessarily require taking a sick day – just telecommute to avoid infecting the rest of your office. These little perks are made possible by the tools of the telecommuting trade – Email, voice/video messaging, IM and text messaging, and, yes, even the good ‘ol phone – tools that allow us to communicate effectively, remotely, with our employees, managers, and customers.
But telecommuting is hard, because these tools fail in one, critical way: they don’t really support the impromptu interactions that take place when people are face-to-face. Email won’t tell you when a coworker is swearing about some problem they’re struggling with, your manager can’t have a conference call to invite everyone out to drinks on a Friday afternoon, and Skype won’t let you eavesdrop on that conversation about Hans, the incompetent Q/A consultant that’s the real bottleneck your company is struggling with.
Nor do these tools tell you when people are available, which is a huge problem. Conversations must be planned and scheduled. Even if that means nothing more than sending a quick “you there?” over IM, it is still extra overhead in the process. And when this breaks down, when people aren’t available for whatever reason, communication slows to a snail’s pace as you play phone tag, or wait for a response to that email you sent Friday afternoon.
At Zenbe, we’ve stumbled across a nifty little trick that has been surprisingly helpful on this front. We call it the “ZenCam”. That’s it over there, on the right. It’s nothing too special, just a spare webcam that we’ve mounted on the wall of our main office in New York, and that we hooked into our website. (Click on that thumbnail to see the latest image, which will auto-update every 10 seconds. Don’t be too surprised if all you see is a dark or empty office after hours though.)
The ZenCam provides a fly-on-the-wall perspective of our office to anyone who’s interested. And, yes, that’s a pretty small audience because it’s about as entertaining as watching paint dry. The most exciting thing that’s ever happened was the day some thief snuck in and stole Jay’s wallet and Peter’s iPhone. ‘Didn’t help us catch the guy, of course, but it was sort of fun scanning back through the archived shots to see if we’d caught the guy on film. Not fun for Jay or Peter, I guess.
But boring as the ZenCam may be, it has proven effective at enabling impromptu conversations that remote workers (i.e. me) would ordinarily miss out on. Much of this is because it provides real status info about the people in the office , not just an “away message” in Skype or iChat, or a Facebook status that may or may not be up to date. With a single glance, I can see who is at their desk and who is out to lunch, or who may be caught up in a conversation that I’d like to get in on (or avoid interrupting).
The ZenCam also simplifies some of our more structured communications. For example, Zenbe has a morning status meeting, but because of the irregular schedules people keep, starting this meeting at a set time each day has been difficult. Rather than forcing the entire office to conform to a schedule that’s only necessary for the convenience of one or two remote workers, we instead have the remote folks (usually just me) pop open the ZenCam around the time the meeting should start, and then Skype into the office once we see the people gathering (which may be as half an hour or more later.) ‘Not that big a change to the process, but it’s important to remember that as a telecommuter, you’re at the mercy of the people in the office for getting information. Every little tweak you can provide that makes things it easier and less painful for them to get information to you is worth it!
(Note, too, that the once-per-10-second video above may seem pretty crude, but it is almost as useful as a real-time video feed, with none of the bandwidth concerns. Remote workers can keep a ZenCam page open all day long with no concerns about chewing up bandwidth. Nor does it require special software, which makes it perfect as a way for developing a richer connection to customers or clients you may only talk to once or twice. Just send ‘em the link and wave to the camera.)
Is this something that will work for your office? That depends. For Zenbe, we have the advantage of having a small, “bull pen”-like space where most of the interesting action happens, so it’s easily covered with a single camera. Obviously scaling this to work for an office with more people and rooms would be tricky. Nor is set up of such a thing trivial. We’ve had to write our own scripts to handle pulling images off the camera and publishing them to our website. But I’m pretty sure you could find some comparable off-the-shelf solutions without too much difficulty.
Anyhow, it’s something to think about.
What would you do if you had such a webcam available? Where would you set it up in your office? How would the people in your office use it?
(P.S. If people have reservations about the “Big Brother”-esque nature of the camera, just give ‘em admin access to it. They get all the control, and the worst that’ll happen is that they’ll have fun hacking your webcam.)
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