Most of my career, I’ve worked in a blend of physical and digital environments. While most of my “productive” time has been in front of screens — initially desktop computers, then laptops, and increasingly mobile devices — with few exceptions, I’ve worked with teams and clients I’ve met regularly in “real” spaces like offices and conference rooms.
My collaborators and I would check in on each other in these physical spaces every once in a while, and then go back online. Often, our bodies sat in the same building — which we’d spend much time moving to and from — even though most of our attention while there was focused on our individual computer screens.
That changed two weeks ago. Like many of you, I’m now entirely online — for work, at least. My schedule is still packed, but all meetings are now happening in screens. I only see my collaborators in grids of small rectangles arranged haphazardly in an application window. In one sense, we’re pros at it; we’ve been doing this for years, after all. But now that we have no choice, we’re becoming even more adept at new ways of collaborating remotely.
For example, this week, I learned that Zoom — the software I’ve been using for years for most of my remote meetings — offers breakout “rooms.” This feature allows participants in a conference call to break off from the main meeting into groups to have a smaller discussion or work out a gnarly problem. It’s a boon for remote workshop facilitation. How long has this feature been there? I don’t know, but I never needed to look for it. Now that circumstances have called for it, I’ve gained a new ability.
I expect to learn many other techniques to improve how I collaborate remotely before this unique period of working from home is over. I aim to emerge from this experience as an expert in remote facilitation and teaching. At first, I’ll be clumsy at it — but so is everyone else. I expect we’ll all be more patient with each other at this time, given we’re all trying to get over the awkwardness of being fully remote. But we’ve been granted the opportunity to practice remote collaboration intensely over the next few weeks, and our new abilities will expand the scope of who we can serve, and when.