How These Companies Are Avoiding Zoom Fatigue

Software company Episerver added “shows” to its regular “Episodes” remote meetings for deeper team engagement. Staffers lead exercise and cooking classes, share tips for homeschooling, and more.

A friend told me about her company’s staff meeting today. As the ~75 people joined the Zoom call, there was some casual talk among a few staff about working remotely; a few comments through chat about the lead engineer’s impressive pandemic beard. Staff members were mostly muted and waiting for the meeting to start. 15 minutes into these unstructured exchanges, the CEO kicked off an informal report on the sales pipeline, then put the sales leader on the spot for color commentary (clearly not planned). And then the 30-minute meeting was over.

As my friend told me about the meeting (over a glass of wine on Zoom), we agreed it was a lost opportunity to make it a higher-value event for the team. It sounded like most of company had joined the Zoom call. Clearly the staff were eager for connection: an update, some assurance of how things were going — on a business level and maybe even on a human level, too.

This week, I spoke to several product leaders to understand how they’re handling staff meetings and communications. What does it take to maintain productivity, and bolster staff morale? And how do those things contribute to a hopefully a lagging indicator of steady revenues?

First the good news: There are a lot of great tools (Zoom, Google, Miro, Hangout, BlueJeans, the list goes on…) to enable meetings and collaboration. Like it or not, video meetings are now the main way to meet and keep the business moving.

The bad news? ”If you had a bad meeting culture — lack of agenda, lack of data, unclear follow up — remote work made it worse. Fix that first,” says Gijo Mathew, CPO of VTS, the NYC-based leasing and asset management platform in the commercial real estate industry. “Most companies carried the same meetings over and just made them remote,” Mathew points out. “Rethink your meetings just like you are rethinking company priorities.”

Kevin Broom, CPO of Bynder, the digital asset management company based in Amsterdam, says his team was already highly distributed and the transition was easy. Yet now, “we are exchanging more on our personal lives, especially as it relates to coping,” says Broom. “I believe this is building stronger working relationships and trust in the distributed environment. The standing agenda of OKR progress and blockers, strategic initiative updates is unchanged.”

In addition to two weekly product meetings, the Bynder exec team made the decision early into the pandemic to have three 20-minute townhalls per week. “We ramped up transparency and attendance is 70%,” says Broom. He had kicked off weekly Office Hours / Ask Me Anythings for his teams pre-outbreak. The mix of questions is 60/40 personal vs professional on the questions. “Interestingly, feedback is that people know me better.” says Broom.

Getting personal can be just what the team needs. Justin Anovick is CPO of Episerver, a US-headquartered software company with 10+ global offices. The company had been hosting remote meetings called “Episodes,” started as an initiative to educate their employees on what’s happening with the business. They talk about programs, departments, individuals — to help give everyone an understanding of what they’re doing.

“Once COVID happened we decided to add a twice a week ‘show’ where we talked about things not related to Episerver,” says Anovick. “Our first one was around how to homeschool your kids and other advice for parents about working from home. We then did an exercise episode followed by cooking and recently just did an entertainment one where people reviewed books, movies, tv shows, etc.”

Anovick co-hosts the show with Amberly Dressler (from Episerver’s Corp Communications). They source all content from employees or relatives. “Our aim is to get everyone together, have fun but also provide some relevant content that people (and their families might enjoy), says Anovick. The benefit of hosting? The swag. All show “talent”/presenters receive a coveted “Episodes” t-shirt.