By Danny Sullivan
I was over in Canada last week for some important meetings and it really drove home to me the value of being able to converse face-to-face. As a remote worker, I spend a fair amount of time joining meetings by phone, which is an effective but impersonal method of communicating.
My experience last week of sitting in a new client’s boardroom with about ten other people in the room was very positive. Ideas were being exchanged and the conversation was flowing dynamically. Had I been forced to participate in the same meeting by conference call, it would have been a far different story. Simply trying to determine who is speaking at any one time would have been a huge challenge, let alone trying to interject with constructive comment from my little speaker in the middle of the room!
Similarly, the roundtable I had with colleagues during my visit was a highly constructive one. The benefit of being able to interact in a lively conversation, without having to wait for a suitable period of silence to make oneself heard is a real benefit. Those little physical gestures that we use to convey humour, emphasize a point, or to imply something else than what is being said, all become moot to the guy on the end of the line.
This may all sound obvious, but in today’s productivity focused workplace, we often feel that the time spent traveling to sit in the same room as a colleague or client is time that could be better spent on other things. Why not just catch up by phone and save yourself those precious minutes or hours?
Certainly, the conference call is a vital tool for most businesses, and I could not do my job without it, but none of us should forget the real value that can be gained from having a good old fashioned conversation, up close and personal.
