It’s been a year since the COVID-19 pandemic forced the world into emergency remote work. The vaccine is being rolled out, employees are returning to the office, and companies are evaluating the lessons from a year of remote work.
This last year has proven that collaboration can be done remotely. Organizations have learned to hire, lead projects, and build relationships without being colocated. As I have talked to talent strategists and business leaders, however, the general sense is that these things haven’t been as effective remotely, and they are looking forward to being physically together again.
I agree with those leaders, but I will argue that they’ve learned the wrong lesson from the pandemic. The key insight is not that we are currently more effective in person; the true discovery is that remote collaboration is not that far behind, and the gap is closing.
In March of 2020, many hiring managers had never conducted a virtual interview. Few project leaders had lead an initiative without a single fully co-located meeting. Most talent development facilitators delivered purely face-to-face training. We were starting from scratch.
The last year was a steep learning curve, but now most employees are at least functional in virtual collaboration technologies. The tools have improved dramatically as well: just look at Microsoft Teams, which has added breakout rooms, live captions, and large group features.
So what does the future hold? The costs of spontaneous colocation will remain; until we develop teleporters, transit time, travel costs, and hotel charges aren’t going away. But, virtual collaboration will continue to improve:
- The tools will get better. Zoom and Teams are continuing to add features, and specialized software like Miro for whiteboarding is evolving to solve the remaining collaborative problems.
- Virtual collaboration skills will continue to improve. Even if most organizations return to the workplace, they will embrace more “work from anywhere” than before. So, employees will continue to practice remote collaboration.
In other words: the costs of in-person collaboration are steady, and the comparative efficacy of remote collaboration is getting better. The trend line is clear. The future of collaboration is going to be remote.