I consider these concalls (as they're known) to offer many advantages, most of which are more "con" than "call":
- IT people are rarely easy on the eye. So really, people, who needs to see all that dysfunctional body language and bad hair?
- I can do my other work while on mute
- I can have other conversations while on mute. In the office or cheeky quick phone calls.
- I can travel from A to B while on mute. Elevators pose some risks, but if you put your phone against the crack of the doors as the elevator goes up or down, it helps enormously. None of this is a metaphor.
- It can be easily done from home in a bathrobe.
- A cup of coffee can be seamlessly integrated into the call. Experienced concallers can take out the garbage. Experts can visit the local store to get milk. But only the very elite (my camp, if I do say so) can conduct fights with cab drivers in parallel to facilitating a call.
- One can sneak a visit to the toilet. I would never do that of course. I said One.
- You can jump on chat with someone else who is also on the call and make subversive comments ("does this make sense to you?" or "he has no idea what he's talking about" or "if you give me $5 I will interrupt with something irrelevant ..."
- You can jump on chat with someone else who is also on the call and comment constructively ("why don't you ask when the due date will be" or "good point - reinforce that you met your yearly targets being exceeded as well")
- You can jump on chat with the facilitator and attempt to make him laugh mid sentence (in the more successful cases, you can hear your message arrive via a 'beep' and then them slowly ... break ... down into a series of stacatto syllables. sometimes they get so distracted that they completely lose their train of thought and if they are champion chatters, you will get a "shut up fucker" in the middle of it all).
- You can start giggling during serious issues. An example of this is below.
A successful concall generally involves sending out an advance agenda (MS Word) and presentation (MS PowerPoint), alongside a dial-in number and PIN. So we're all reading through the slides at the same time, in the vein of:
"Now if you'll just look at the chart on slide 24."
On today's monthly call the main presentation was about recent changes to the organisation which had been driven of the US. We had recently acquired a new company for a couple of billion. Large acquisitions nearly always means changes to marketing, sales and corporate structure to leverage (you may say justify) the new groceries as you lay them out on the table and work out which cupboard they are supposed to go into.
The main topic of today's conference was that America has been doing some global restructuring.
No names, no job titles, just big boxes on the slide connected by arrows to show how we're all going to look in the future.
I looked carefully for a moment and realised that I couldn't see my box. I actually think I've been disappeared. It's very H G Wells. Am I Griffin?
Most of the people on this concall have big departments in large geographical areas. Their reactions were one of muted shock. You could almost hear them masking a self-interested gasp as they carefully phrased some vague questions about the future business model. What these polite questions were really asking was if they were getting the flick. Terrified wolves in optimistic sheep's clothing.
In 1983 Rosabeth Kanter wrote a book called The change masters. She listed 10 common reasons that people resist change in organisations. The last one is my favourite: "Sometimes the threat is real."
Do I care about all this restructuring? Not at all. I actually had a little giggle when I heard it.
Maybe I've been restructured. Maybe I'm getting renovated. Maybe I'm just being renamed (to Gordon, hopefully).
I didn't have an empire in the first place and have no plans to build one.
If this threat of elimination was presented to Nero, he would probably had ordered the execution of the messenger. When it was presented to me, I felt like steak for dinner. I guess we both use murder to make ourselves feel better.
I'm not sure if the picture is an homage to my recent weight gain, my feelings at work or my general sense of displacement. But I love the annoyed expression on Alice's face ... it reminds me of Vicky Pollard ... and what's not to love about Vicky Pollard?
