I have been an advocate of collaboration and remote work for years, but I’ve lately been attracting attention because of my LinkedIn Learning courses, especially “Managing Virtual Teams” and “Business Collaboration in the Modern Workplace.”
While it’s amazingly gratifying to have somehow evolved into a perceived authority, it’s even more exciting to me to see the widespread adoption of ideas whose time has finally come.
My first exposure to the idea of virtual workspaces came in 2004, while I was working as a technical communicator for a Fortune 500 company. I received a message from Sébastien Jeanjean, one of the founders of the French company Tixeo.
Tixeo was a pioneer in this field, but the three young original partners had already secured a grant from the French government and won their first clients. Their platform allowed remote users to log into a common online workspace that used 3D avatars who could interact with each other – very like the approach used by Second Life years later.
What was really cool was that online meeting attendees could break into smaller workgroups, then come back together. Any artifacts were available to all the online participants, so everyone could see what work was going on.
I thought this was amazing, and immediately agreed to help Sébastien get it in front of the right people at the company. Unfortunately, this was not to be – despite the fact that the company prided itself on being new and innovative, the best we could do was get one IT director to participate in a demo, and even they did it more as a personal favor to me. Their reaction afterwards: “Yeah, it’s kind of cool – but I can’t see any kind of business application. When people meet, they need to do it in person.”
And so it went, for years. Managers and employees would fly internationally to attend planning sessions and even half-day meetings. Working remotely was known about, but generally viewed with suspicion.
Then, in 2012, I joined a project group working on bringing enterprise social to the organization. I stepped in as Global Training Manager for the project, and spent the next few years rolling out tools like Cisco WebEx Social and Yammer – tools that not only allowed employees to make and maintain virtual connections, but which also opened the door to “the Cloud.”
Suddenly, the enterprise was doing a sizable amount of work online, leveraging file sharing and co-editing, SaaS and PaaS services, and more. As an advocate, I decided to set an example by working from home at least once a week. I also started providing online training to our global team members via the various web meeting services available.
And now, here we are, a few years later, and almost the entire business world is working remote during the health crisis. I am thankful for the groundwork done by the early innovators and advocates – without them, we would have much more work to do than was necessary.
Oh, and Tixeo? Still going strong – Check them out at https://www.tixeo.com/, and tell Sébastien I sent you.