On this episode of Futurum Live! From the Show Floor, The Futurum Group’s Craig Durr talks about the challenges companies face today with hybrid work and return-to-office initiatives with Jeff Smith, Head of Product – Meetings, Spaces, and Rooms at Zoom. This insightful discussion encapsulates some of the exciting announcements from the mainstage keynote of Zoomtopia 2023.
Their discussion covers:
- How Zoom has approached their own hybrid work implementations
- Removing friction to make the return-to-office meaningful for employees
Join us as we talk through challenges, friction, and the benefits of hybrid work in 2023.
You can find Part 2 of this interview by subscribing to our YouTube channel, as well as other insights from Zoom executives at Zoomtopia 2023.
You can view the video of their conversation here:
Listen to the audio below:
Or grab the audio on your streaming platform of choice here:
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Transcript:
Craig Durr: Hey, everybody, this is Craig Durr with The Futurum Group, research director that focuses on workplace collaboration. We are here live at Zoomtopia 2023, and I’m excited to bring to you a very special guest. This is Jeff Smith, head of product for meetings, spaces, and rooms. Right?
Jeff Smith: That’s right.
Craig Durr: There’s a lot going on there, Jeff.
Jeff Smith: There is. And what’s front and center? AI, hybrid work.
Craig Durr: I know.
Jeff Smith: All the challenges that everybody’s facing right now, we’re living every day.
Craig Durr: Okay. Now, Jeff’s a good friend of mine and we have so much to talk about. We’re actually going to break this up into two parts of this interview. In the beginning, this first one, Jeff, you and I said we wanted to talk about the challenge that we are both hearing customers talk about, which is hybrid work, how to make it work in the office? Tell me about some of the things you’re hearing from customers.
Jeff Smith: Hearing a lot about the uncertainty, just the challenges of how much real estate do I need? Where should it be? I hired a bunch during the last few years that was completely distributed and now I want to get the benefits of bringing people back together. But how do I do that in a way that still leverages the flexibility that people are looking for and they’ve grown accustomed to, but also brings me the benefits of culture and that cohesion that we get from actually coming together in-person? At Zoom, we’ve struggled with this as well. We went with a structured hybrid approach where we have people that were within radius of an office that do come in two days a week, but we’re Zoom, we’re all over the place, so we live the remote worker lifestyle as well. All of it.
Craig Durr: I’ve talked to some people and it was really interesting, they were talking about their entire teams were hired during the pandemic, that these teams never even knew what in-person was, this form of collaboration. So there’s an interesting challenge, and what I talk to people a lot about is there’s no single playbook for each company. It’s going to vary from company to company as well, too. You hit an interesting thing, culture plays a big part into this. Tell me, how do you talk to people about workplace culture? What does that mean to you?
Jeff Smith: For us, I looked at, how did Zoom’s culture evolve from the 2019 Zoom culture? We were a small company back then and people were very, very close in terms of personal relationships. The mass of hiring that we did over the next few years, again, completely distributed indiscriminate of location and completely looking at just talent wherever we could get it, that was a cultural shift where people weren’t as comfortable with a cold call, for example, because they hadn’t seen somebody face-to-face. They didn’t understand that that was okay, for me to just call somebody. And so there was a lot more hesitancy in the interpersonal relationships. So getting back to that, understanding, how do we get from a much more structured, “I talk to somebody when I’ve scheduled a meeting with them,” To, “We’re now comfortable with ad hoc,” Is a shift back to something that is a much more fluid culture.
Craig Durr: One of the things I notice that you do at Zoom that I really like, and I talked to some other HR experts about this, is culture is not beliefs. Culture is behavior. You can put the beliefs and the values on the wall, but it’s really the actions that take place. It’s the group action and it’s everything from examples that Eric and yourself set as executives of the company to what the employees feel they’re comfortable doing right now. That’s one of the key things I think I’ve really enjoyed about Zoom and the team, your team members that I met, right?
Jeff Smith: Yeah, and all those beliefs are what we really aspire to do, but the actual culture and the aspirational culture can have a gap. And that’s where we try to close that gap by our practices and improving.
What I would say is the companies that are engaging in the uncertainty, that are working toward solutions, taking action instead of staying on the sidelines and waiting to see how it pans out, those are the companies that are learning and improving and building a culture that is fit for hybrid instead of waiting for hybrid to happen so that then they can take action.
Craig Durr: You have to be dynamic in how you’re addressing this. It isn’t a static set event. I absolutely agree with that.
Jeff Smith: And it’s scary. I mean, it’s scary, because you don’t know all the answers when you’re going into it.
Craig Durr: No.
Jeff Smith: But that’s how we get better.
Craig Durr: Open and honest about that. It’s interesting because one of your areas, spaces, plays into a core technology, I think, in helping this take place. I call it workplace experience platforms myself, but what I see taking place within, for example, the Zoom spaces, which is everything from desk reservation to visitor check-in to even way finding now as part of this as well too, it’s helping to try and remove friction, I think. Is that one of the key elements in trying to make people comfortable coming in?
Jeff Smith: Absolutely. There’s two things that you need in order to get people out of their home office, into the car, and into the physical office together. One is they have to see a real tangible benefit in terms of the experience that they get when they’re there. And two, you have to really reduce the amount of friction that it takes to accomplish it. There’s a lot of coordination overhead that takes place when you have a group of people that has ultimate flexibility in their schedule, but needs to get this experience of being together to have it valuable for any of them. And so, if we can reduce the friction, make it easier, suggest times, use AI, then it’s just about driving.
Craig Durr: Depends on your city, that could be an issue.
Jeff Smith: Then it’s going to be all right.
Craig Durr: That could be. That’s great. Also, I love that some of the other tools. I know we’re going to talk about products in a moment, but I love what you guys introduced with Docs, because, to me, that is just the great example of what you see in terms of a hybrid work style working within a hybrid environment, working within a hybrid team, in fact, too, right?.
Jeff Smith: Yeah.
Craig Durr: The dynamic nature of how people collaborate,
Jeff Smith: It’s a big shift and it’s a shift that’s been ongoing for, probably, a decade. You saw, all of us are accustomed to a document that is a printed set of paper and it’s physical and it lives in a particular place and it’s static. And the evolution is to much more collaborative workspace without the constraints of 8.5 by 11 paper. That’s more about, how do I get to a decision and how do I progress a project than it is about creating a document that looks a particular way. We were so focused on the presentation of content and the structure of content got headers and footers, and I’ve got Roman numerals in the right place, has nothing to do with getting to the right answer. So the next generation of documents is more about a collaborative workspace, where we bring in information from the source, and it’s a living source, it’s living when it’s on our workspace and it’s living when it hits its destination. But this is the place where we do the work on it.
Craig Durr: Boom.
Jeff Smith: It’s really fun.
Craig Durr: It really is, right there. We’re talking about a hybrid environment, hybrid physical space, hybrid collaboration as well, even hybrid output in terms of doing documents. This is great.
Hey, Jeff, thank you so much for these insights. Hey, everyone, I invite you to stay for part two when I talk to Jeff. We’re going to spend some time talking about products, about rooms, and what we have taking place around the office. All right?
Jeff Smith: All right. Appreciate it, Craig.
Craig Durr: Thank you. Everyone, this is Craig with The Futurum Group. Thank you for your time.
Author Information
As Practice Lead - Workplace Collaboration, Craig focuses on developing research, publications and insights that clarify how the workforce, the workplace, and the workflows enable group collaboration and communication. He provides research and analysis related to market sizing and forecasts, product and service evaluations, market trends, and end-user and buyer expectations. In addition to following the technology, Craig also studies the human elements of work - organizing his findings into the workforce, the workplace, and the workflows – and charting how these variables influence technologies and business strategies.
Prior to joining Wainhouse, now a part of The Futurum Group, Craig brings twenty years of experience in leadership roles related to P&L management, product development, strategic planning, and business development of security, SaaS, and unified communication offerings. Craig's experience includes positions at Poly, Dell, Microsoft, and IBM.
Craig holds a Master of Business Administration from the Texas McCombs School of Business as well as a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Tulane University.
