Tom Warren writing in The Verge:
Microsoft is revealing more about how people are using its Teams app, and it predicts the novel coronavirus pandemic will be a turning point that will change how we work and learn forever. Demand for Microsoft Teams surged worldwide last month, jumping from 32 million daily active users to 44 million in just a week. While usage continues to rise, Microsoft is releasing a new remote work trend report to highlight how work habits are changing.
The article offers some details about the increase in usage of Microsoft’s Teams and Stream remote collaboration tools during the pandemic. No surprise there; we’ve seen similar reports from Slack and Zoom. But more interestingly, the article also speculates about our technology landscape after the crisis has passed:
“It’s clear to me there will be a new normal,” explains [Microsoft 365 head Jared]Spataro. “If you look at what’s happening in China and what’s happening in Singapore, you essentially are in a time machine. We don’t see people going back to work and having it be all the same. There are different restrictions to society, there are new patterns in the way people work. There are societies that are thinking of A days and B days of who gets to go into the office and who works remote.”
As a result, widespread adoption of remote collaboration technologies will become a more permanent feature of the workplace, with less of the stigma they had before the pandemic:
Microsoft is also seeing cases where remote workers can no longer be an afterthought in meetings, and how chat can influence video calls. “The simplest example is how important chat becomes as part of a meeting,” says Spataro. “We’re not seeing it as being incidental anymore, we’re actually seeing it be a new modality for people to contribute to the meeting.” This could involve people chatting alongside video meetings, and coworkers upvoting suggestions and real-time feedback.
I don’t have firsthand experience with Teams. However, I’ve used competing systems — including Zoom, Webex, GoToMeeting, Slack, and Skype — for a long time. Many offer the ability to chat alongside video calls. Invariably, the chat feature feels tacked on, with little thought to the integration between it and the video stream.
Mixing synchronous and asynchronous communications is a tough challenge, but it also has lots of potentials. For example, I’ve been in remote meetings where team members collaborate to write meeting minutes using Google Docs in real-time. With enough people taking notes, the result is a powerful augmentation of everyone’s cognitive abilities. Still, the tool isn’t designed to do this. There is no connection between the words in the document and what’s said in the call.
Such new work modalities have been around for a while, but the pandemic is accelerating their adoption. We’re likely to see innovations that will be with us long after the crisis subsides.
Microsoft Thinks Coronavirus Will Forever Change the Way We Work and Learn