Chapter 12
Getting Everyone to Zoom Together
IN THIS CHAPTER
Understanding why people are unlikely to resist using Zoom
Giving advice on why individuals and employees need to embrace Zoom
I’m going to go out on a limb here: The chapters in this book have energized you. You’re now thinking about all the ways that Zoom can improve how your colleagues, friends, and others collaborate and communicate.
Good.
There’s just one small problem, though. Success with Zoom is not only or even primarily about you. To realize its benefits within your team and throughout your organization, your coworkers and friends need to embrace it as well. Make no mistake: Zoom does not exist in a vacuum — and therein lies the rub.
This chapter offers advice on how to get your colleagues to share your excitement about Zoom. Ideally, this feeling will translate into widespread usage. As a result, everybody wins. Your organization, employees, colleagues, customers, and partners will reap its significant rewards.
Understanding the Relative Ease of Zoom Adoption
In my years, I’ve learned quite a few things about how technology and people intersect. The following truism lies at the top of the list: When it comes to technology, people generally hate change.
Although usually understandable, this mindset is still maddening. For four intertwined reasons, however, it’s unlikely that you’ll have to twist your colleagues’ arms to get them to regularly use Meetings & Chat. Trust me: You can’t say the same thing about every new enterprise technology.
Zoom is remarkably easy to use
I’ll start with the elephant in the room: The Zoom desktop client is easy to install, configure, and use. Sure, like any program, users often ignore some of its nuances and most valuable features. (Hopefully, this book shines a light on them, but I digress.)
Put differently, Zoom passes what some people call the Grandma test. It’s easy to explain Zoom to someone who lacks a strong technical background.
Zoom doesn’t step on email’s toes
Go back to early January 2020. Assume that hundreds of millions of decidedly nontechnical people already had at their disposal a user-friendly group videoconference tool. Examples include teachers, small business owners, and senior citizens. They used this magical videoconferencing app daily to conduct a variety of video-based meetings, classes, and the like.
Then a global pandemic broke out.
In this alternative scenario, teachers and professors would not have had to scramble to find a tool that would allow them to teach something resembling a normal class. Ditto for Pilates instructors, rabbis, priests, and countless other professionals. Why? They already possessed a user-friendly, affordable, and reliable videoconferencing tool.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of state and local governments, companies, universities, hospitals, institutions, supply chains, and citizens were wholly unprepared for COVID-19 on many levels. In a critical way, Zoom’s tools fulfilled urgent professional needs. For this very reason, Zoom’s already sizeable customer base ballooned 2,000 percent in the first quarter of 2020.
After all and in hindsight, educators under the gun didn’t have too many other viable options. (To be fair, I’m sure that Skype and Facetime usage increased during that horrifying period. Google Classrooms also experienced meteoric growth.) It’s not as if Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, or another email program allowed educators to simulate in-person classes. Those familiar applications simply did not allow people to easily hold videoconferences. Other asynchronous communication tools weren’t going to cut it either.
Take away that crisis for a moment. Today Zoom would still be a popular tool, but nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is right now. Say what you will about the ethics of forcing people to adopt new technologies, but COVID-19 proves that it often works.
Claiming that Zoom’s offerings don’t directly compete with email isn’t entirely accurate. Chapter 5 covers how to use Meetings & Chat to send text-based messages and files. If you think many people use email for the same purpose, trust your instincts.
Zoom doesn’t require people to rethink how they work
Consider the following two tasks under normal — that is, nonpandemic — circumstances:
- Nudging someone in your organization to use Meetings & Chat, but just for videoconferences.
- Convincing a coworker to abandon his email fetish. Instead, you want him to use Slack or Microsoft Teams.
By and large, the first chore is relatively easy to accomplish. The second, however, can be downright maddening. Here’s the obvious question: why the distinction? After all, aren’t all of those preceding tools communication and collaboration applications?
The short answer is that people often lack the time and desire to learn new things — especially when it comes to new work-related technologies and apps. For the longer, more nuanced answer, see the nearby sidebar.
Brass tacks: You will rarely encounter people who are anywhere near as defensive about switching to Zoom from another videoconferencing tool. Relative to other tools, Zoom doesn’t cut nearly as close to the bone.
Zoom benefits from network effects
Imagine for a moment that you’re the only person in the world on Facebook.
In this scenario, Facebook is effectively worthless. After all, no one can connect with you — and vice versa. You can share a meme or funny story, but no one will see it. In a way, a single-member version of Facebook may as well not exist.
Add just one more person to the social network, though, and its value increases. You now can communicate with that other person. (By the way, you can say the same thing about a fax machine, a telephone, an email address, an Internet connection, or any other communications medium.) Now add a million more members to Facebook or a billion. The network is now exponentially more powerful and useful than before.
I’ve just demonstrated the concept of a network effect. At its core, think of network effects simply as elusive yet powerful and virtuous cycles that offer major benefits to companies and users alike. When a company is able to create a vaunted network effect, the value of its product or service grows exponentially. (According to Metcalfe’s Law, it increases in proportion to the number of people using it.)
Zoom is no exception to this rule. More people started using Meetings & Chat because, reflexively, an increasing number of people were already using it. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, and Netflix are just a few of the other companies that have benefited enormously from network effects.
To wit, starting in February 2020, a buzz started building around Zoom. Tens of millions of people were willing to give it a shot, even though many, if not most, of them already used Skype, FaceTime, or another tool. Now that Zoom has become the de facto standard for videoconferencing, convincing newbies to use it isn’t difficult.
Put differently, say that there’s an obscure but objectively better, more secure, cheaper, more reliable, and more user-friendly videoconferencing app out there. Call it Marzipan. (Yes, this name is yet another nod to the band Marillion.) Unfortunately, because of its obscurity, no one uses Marzipan. Jane and John Q. Public have never heard of it. Beyond that, IT departments are reluctant to sanction it in the workplace. After all, it could pose a security risk to the enterprise.
Again, Zoom doesn’t face this problem. Holding a meeting via Zoom is commonplace these days. In fact, you’re more likely to face resistance by recommending a tool other than Meetings & Chat for your next videoconference.
Applying Different Types of Techniques
Make no mistake: Anticipating little employee resistance to Zoom is not the same thing as facing no resistance at all. To that end, here’s some advice for how to maximize the chance that Zoom takes root in your organization. I’ve broken the tips into two buckets: organizational and individual.
Organizational techniques
At a high level, employers can do a number of things to prioritize Meetings & Chat over similar videoconferencing tools.
Retire similar videoconferencing apps
Say that people in your organization have used some of the videoconferencing tools described in Chapter 1 for years — sometimes a decade or more. For example, newly hired Marvin and Paul in sales love Zoom, but Jules and Jody in accounting count themselves among the Webex crowd. Vince and Butch in HR prefer GoToMeeting. For their part, Marsellus and Mia in marketing refuse to wean themselves off of Google Hangouts Meet. (Apropos of nothing, these names refer to Pulp Fiction characters.)
Marvin and Paul need to bring the whole team together for a companywide virtual meeting. Forget agreeing on times and dates: The group can’t even decide which tool to use. No one wants to back down.
I’ve seen this movie before in my days as an enterprise-systems consultant. Employees are busy with their day jobs; they often don’t want to devote the necessary time to learn a new application. As a result, different groups use their own tools. They want others to bend to their wishes, not the other way around.
The solution is simple: A senior person at the company should make an executive call. That individual may be the president, founder, or chief technology officer (CTO). Regardless, the company needs to pick a lane.
Such a move doesn’t just eliminate carping among departments and groups. Relying upon a single tool confers additional benefits to the organization and ultimately its employees.
Consider two companies:
- Company A: It subscribes to only Zoom.
- Company B: It subscribes to a slew of comparable videoconferencing tools, including Zoom, Webex, and GoToMeeting.
Which one do you think spends less money on software licenses?
Second, it’s far easier to secure a company when employees use a single app or suite of apps than myriad ones from different software vendors. Anyone who has spent a few months working in IT knows as much.
Note that your organization may not be able to completely eliminate its use of Zoom’s competitors. For example, say that your company’s sales reps routinely hold calls with prospective clients, some of which use Webex. Insisting that they use Meetings & Chat in lieu of their preferred application may be a deal-breaker.
Warn first-time offenders
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
— Hanlon’s Razor
I remember when videoconferencing tools began to make inroads in the mid- to late-1990s. Back then, few employees used laptops. (I knew a few executives who used them as expensive paperweights, but that’s an entirely different discussion.) Most employees found themselves figuratively chained to theirs desks and their clunky beige boxes. Contemporary smartphones didn’t exist, never mind apps.
Those days are long gone. For more than a decade, people have been living in an era of bring your own device (BYOD) and Shadow IT. The latter term simply means that untold numbers of workers routinely use software applications not sanctioned by the IT department while on the clock.
In case you’re curious, blocking network access to specific apps at work usually fails. Employees can simply use their phones’ personal data plans from AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile. Confiscating employee phones will cause far more problems than it will solve.
What to do?
At the risk of being heavy-handed, it behooves management to explain to employees the benefits of using Zoom’s tools, such as those described in the prior section. In the event that an employee or group of employees ignores the new Zoom-only policy, it’s best to politely sit them down and cover it again.
Part ways with repeat offenders
Employees who routinely ignore the Zoom-only policy may not be evil. They may just be stubborn or too lazy to learn a new tool. Regardless, letting them slide sends a dangerous message to everyone else in the organization: These folks are special. The rules don’t apply to them.
If you are comfortable setting such a dangerous precedent, then don’t be surprised when more and more employees ignore your firm’s rules. If you’re not, then it may be time to show recalcitrant folks the door.
Encourage employees to use Zoom’s powerful third-party apps
Although Microsoft Excel gives it a run for its money, the killer business app of the last 25 years is email.
Where would you be without it?
Thanks to email, you can communicate with just about anyone in the world — and vice versa. (See the section “Zoom benefits from network effects,” earlier in this chapter, for more information here.)
Over the last quarter-century, untold numbers of employees have improved and expanded how they use email. For their part, software vendors have added to their email programs new features such as read receipt, recall messages, better spam detection, focused inboxes, and countless others.
Think of Zoom as a continuation of this evolution. Employees can install third-party apps that connect Zoom not only to Gmail and Outlook, but to many other valuable services. Examples include Slack and Microsoft Teams, among others. Doing so can facilitate scheduling meetings, effective business communication, and save employees a great deal of time. (Chapter 7 discusses third-party apps in far more detail.)
Offer Zoom training
Meetings & Chat wouldn’t be nearly as popular if it were difficult to use. Although very similar in concept to legacy videoconferencing tools such as Webex and GoToMeeting, differences still persist. If management wants all employees to use Meetings & Chat and nothing else, then ideally it will offer training and ensure that employees attend. Period.
If your organization isn’t equipped to hold in-person Zoom training sessions for thousands of employees, fear not. I cover some of the excellent online resources in Chapter 16.
Individual techniques
Organizations can do only so much. At some point, you are ultimately responsible for the applications that you use at work — and how you use them.
Consolidate your tools
Does the following scenario ring too close to home?
At work, you routinely use a panoply of tools, including
- Email: Lots and lots of email
- A powerful collaboration app, such as Slack or Microsoft Teams
- Videoconferencing tools, such as Zoom and Webex
- An internal wiki
- A project or task management app, such as Todoist, Trello, or Microsoft Project
- LinkedIn and other social networks, mostly for work-related purposes (wink-wink)
- Dropbox, Box, or OneDrive for file sharing
- Productivity suites, such as Microsoft Office and Google Drive
- Mainstream enterprise systems, such as Workday, Salesforce, and others
Oh, and you often access these programs on your laptop, tablet, and smartphone.
Does reading the preceding list exhaust you or describe your day to a tee? At least I can report some good news: You’re not alone in feeling overwhelmed.
It turns out that tool fatigue is real and even harmful. A good deal of research has proven that multitasking is a misnomer. Rather, you are multichanging. (Big difference.) Constantly shifting back and forth among different programs and devices hinders productivity and rewires brains in ways that neurologists don’t completely understand yet.
For more on this important subject, see the 2011 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (W. W. Norton & Company) by Nicolas Carr.
What to do?
First, take a page from Marie Kondō, author of the bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (Ten Speed Press). For the vast majority of employees, I doubt that using PowerPoint or Excel sparks anything close to joy.
Fair enough, but workers can often take Kondō’s decluttering idea to the digital world. Say that your employer, department, or manager allows employees to hold meetings via every videoconferencing tool under the sun. Fine, but you don’t have to use them all. Rather, it’s best to pick a lane (Meetings & Chat) and stay in it as much as you can.
Consolidate your conversations
Say that you’re working on a marketing project with your colleagues Larry, Kent, Doug, Mandy, and Greg. Sometimes you exchange emails and text messages with them. Most of the time, you ask them questions in Slack channels. Occasionally, however, you find yourself using Meetings & Chat.
The day before the project’s due date, you forget a key decision that the group made. You’re certain that it’s out there, but where exactly is it?
- In your inbox?
- On your phone’s messages app?
- WhatsApp or Snapchat?
- In a comment in a Google Doc or Word Document?
- In Zoom?
- In the Slack workspace?
- In more than one of these apps?
- None of the preceding tools?
You frantically scramble to find that key piece of information.
Again, Meetings & Chat does not necessarily portend the end of email and other full-fledged collaboration tools, such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. You’ll probably continue to use a number of applications to communicate with others inside and outside of your company’s walls. As of this writing, there’s no one mega-search app that scans disparate tools and documents for key pieces of information.
To this end, do yourself a favor: On group projects, decide from the get-go which communication tool you’ll use and, most important, stick with it. If people begin deviating from your agreed-upon program, use memes, emojis, and other good-natured ways to gently remind them about the group’s decision. Escalate if these techniques don’t work.
Embrace Zoom channels
One of the biggest frustrations of heavy email users is the never-ending inbox.
For years, power users have embraced folders, rules, filters, and tags — depending on their email client of choice. Doing so has allowed them to more quickly locate key correspondence and files.
Zoom lets you do the same thing. Take advantage of the functionality. Specifically, channels — covered in Chapter 5 — address this very issue. They take just a few seconds to set up. By consistently using them, you’ll keep Zoom organized. In the process, you’ll dramatically reduce the time required to find key conversations.