In this episode of Speak PR, host Jim James reflects on the transformative impact of a large organization that has conducted over one million Microsoft Teams meetings. He outlines how virtual meetings accelerated strategy implementation (from 30 months to six), saved travel costs and time, and enabled massive gatherings of 400‑1,000 participants. He discusses new work protocols such as pre‑meeting polling, democratic Q&A, and the shift in file‑sharing and archiving practices that now integrate directly with meeting platforms and cross‑organization search. James then examines the psychological toll of virtual‑meeting fatigue—self‑view, video latency, home distractions, and the loss of workplace symbols, rituals, and myths that traditionally energize staff. He highlights platform innovations accelerated by COVID, including Microsoft’s Together mode (avatars), dynamic view, and improved security and background features, arguing these changes make a return to pre‑pandemic norms unlikely. Using the destruction of the 4th‑century Ma Elian Monastery as an analogy, he stresses the importance of physical symbols and shared rituals for cultural cohesion. Finally, he proposes concrete ways companies can re‑infuse energy into remote teams—sending branded items, background logos, tokens, or other tangible symbols—to counter fatigue and rebuild a sense of purpose and community. The episode concludes with a call for leaders to create new myths, symbols, and rituals that sustain engagement in a distributed work environment.
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Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and I'm here to share some thoughts and some tools that companies can use to unlock the value in their businesses through effective communications and public relations. And on this episode, we're going to talk about some of the learnings that have happened for the company that has held over 1 million Teams meetings online. And I'm also going to be thinking about the impact of symbols and how when we're working from home and when we're in virtual places, the symbols and the culture and the rituals that we have in our offices and our workplaces are missing. And this may also, in my view, be adding to the sense of fatigue, because not only are we not surrounded by our colleagues, but we're not surrounded by the things and the places and the logos and the canteens that normally fuel a company culture. So welcome to this episode of Speak PR. Now, I was talking to another dad today. We were doing a drop-off on the kids for an overnight sleepover, and as he removed the noise-canceling headphones, this fellow father who has been working now from home during lockdown since March shared that his company has now got the distinction of hosting over 1 million Microsoft Teams meetings. Now they have 40,000 members of staff, and he said that it's transformed the way that they run their business. Interestingly enough, he said that they've been able to accelerate their strategy implementation from taking nearly 30 months to 6 months. They saved a massive amount on travel, on incidentals. They've also saved a massive amount of just time. And they can also host meetings with 400 to 1,000 people in a way that wasn't possible. He shared with me about the, the impact of polling, about the impact of taking all the questions in advance and letting the, the attendees on the meeting to vote for which ones that they wanted to address first. Now, it wasn't always the case that the, the people in the field were asking the questions that the management team wanted to answer. But it was giving them a forum to do so, and the management team was also very aware that if they didn't take these questions seriously, that they'd undermined the whole process of this democratic sharing, this town hall meeting. So what we're seeing is already that some new protocols and some new ways of working are needing to be established in teams or Zoom, or for example the Skype, or even the Facebook meetings. So we're moving into another phase of maturity, and this fellow father was saying that they're such a large organization that they actually work directly with Microsoft on some of the input of the program. And he said one of the implications is that file sharing now and file archiving is being fundamentally changed because in the same way that people would go to a meeting and share a PowerPoint and then maybe share documentation with one another in the room or over a cup of coffee in the office, now people are sharing documents whilst they're in a meeting. So the file sharing structure and the file archiving structure is, is changing. And when it's impacting 40,000 people and over a million meetings, you can just imagine the scale of the issue that's being, being faced. So now they're talking about the need to integrate email, for example, in the, in the cross-organization search. And this ability, as we're seeing with platforms like Microsoft and also with Zoho, of really the complete ecosystem of the business being online. Now, we also talked about how their psychologists have been working with this company on the impact of Teams and the volume of these virtual meetings and fatigue. And they were saying that, for example, they're being encouraged to turn off the video when they're not speaking because It actually creates a latency between what you're saying and what you're hearing. But also, we become self-conscious about what we look like on screen rather than just focusing on the person who's speaking. Now, I hadn't really thought of that before, but it's quite true that if we're both sort of watching ourselves and watching the person speaking, a little bit of our body language, a bit of our behavior is distracted. So it's using up some of the processing that would otherwise— for example, if you're in a meeting with 10 or 12 people or at a conference, you wouldn't be constantly looking at yourself in the mirror, but you are when you're on a Zoom or a Teams or another video call. Plus, of course, there's all the anxiety of, you know, is your home office smart? Are the children coming in? For me, is my dog going to bark when there's a delivery, right? So there's a lot of other things going on that are contributing to fatigue. So what they're looking at doing now, apparently with Microsoft, is they're looking at ways to make virtual events less exhausting. So they're having, for example, a Together mode that they've launched in June, which places an avatar of meeting participants in a virtual meeting In other words, you wouldn't put yourself online, but you would have an avatar. You'd have a representative of yourself there rather than just your, your meeting and your personal name initials as we currently have, or maybe a photograph. The benefit of avatars is they could look a bit more consistent, a little bit more professional, for example, whereas at the minute people have photographs of all manner of— some into a screen, some professional, and so on. And the, um, the person from, uh, Microsoft Research, Jaron Lanier, who's a scientist, said he was totally motivated, um, and conceived and prototyped and tested and realized this new Together mode during the pandemic. And he says, I suspect that if it hadn't been for the pandemic, it would have been years of testing and development to release something like this Together mode. In other words, we're getting some some software technologies being developed specifically because of COVID but also within a COVID time frame. And what this means is that the likelihood of going back to how it used to be is increasingly slight because actually the software, as we've seen, all of us that have used Zoom or Teams have realized just the massive advances made across everything from security to background being blurred, to audio, to screen sharing, and so on. Microsoft are also adding in, for example, a dynamic view which is allowing a more flexible presentation. They're allowing simultaneous live streaming of video and smoother transition between— transition between participants, so it's not quite as tiring to have people drop in and out. So all of these aspects we're seeing between Zoom, Teams, Skype, Google Hangouts, or whatever we're using And there's a myriad of, as I've been talking about, dedicated virtual conference and trade show platforms as well. But what I've also been thinking about is why then, with all the benefits that this fellow father is talking about, that he's been able to be at home for the first time in continuous weeks, for the first time in his working career, he's been able to be home every day of the week. And loving how much time and money he's been saving, but he's still missing going to the office. Now, I was just thinking about how what we're missing though when we're not going to the office is also the camaraderie, and he was talking about missing the ability to engage with with team members. But I was also on my way home listening to Radio Four talking about the destruction of the Ma Elian. Monastery in Syria by the ISIS forces. Now, how does one segue between Microsoft Teams and the destruction of a 4th century, uh, monastery in, uh, in Syria? Well, the answer is because it was a pilgrimage site and it sheltered hundreds of Syrian Christians who had survived and huddled In this sanctuary, in spite of the onslaught of the the ISIS forces, the ISIS forces arrived. They captured the French priest, kidnapped him, and the the the community stayed around the building. But then eventually the the The French reverend was was released. He escaped, and and the and the community, his his following came and and and he spoke to them, and they decided they must all leave this part of Syria near Palmyra. And they did so because because the monastery had been destroyed. What had what had been destroyed was more than just a place. It had it had been a symbol of hope. It had been where they collected to hold their rituals, where they would come to pray, where they would have a certain social order, where they would have their culture of what they would wear and what they would read. And they had their symbols of their faith, they had their crosses and they had their scepters and they had their crypts. And these are all elements that, as human beings, bind us to one another. They're the essential elements of any culture that we need— these rituals and these symbols. And we need the myths, the stories that, if you like, validate why all of these things exist and why they all matter and what they all represent. And I was struck that this, this Syrian town had lost this ancient monastery that had been dedicated to a 4th century saint. And so for many hundreds of years, 1,600 years, people have been going as pilgrims to this site. And over a short period of time, a group of people with a A JCB digger had managed to destroy it, but not only destroy the building, but destroy the hope and the faith that these, these Christians had that was represented really in, in fact, the bones of this saint and also of the— just the symbols and what they used in their day to feel connected to their faith. Now Coming back to our working lives, we've— most of us have lost the symbols, the rituals, and the myths of our work environments. By working at home, we've tried to create new environments, but most of us are working in places that are not surrounded by the same kind of people, for sure, but they're not surrounded by signage. We're not surrounded by someone at reception who welcomes us back and asks us how our day was or our weekend was. I personally have a logo that I had made for my offices in Beijing, and I have it here with me. But how many of us as company owners have sent anything to our teams in their home working environments that represent a symbol, a link to the business? It's an opportunity I think that we're missing. Every day I hold a daily huddle with my team in Singapore and the UK, and so at 8:30 we have a call with one team and a 9 o'clock with another, and we have a routine that we go through, and it's based on the Vern Harnish Rockefeller habits. But that's different to walking into an office and feeling the energy of everybody else that is in the room that's already there, or watching other people come in during the day and getting excited about a joint project. And so as we talked about the 1 millionth team meeting that this fellow father and his company had held, there was a sense of great joy at the simple productivity of virtual meetings, at the saved waiting time on the train, the, the £100 a week saved for going for lunch and coffee, the, the no longer needing to replace expensive suits from Gee's and Hawkes. But what we also were lacking as 2 men standing outside a kitchen in a country house, what we were missing was some of the paraphernalia. We were, we were missing the church, we were missing the temple. We were missing the factory. We were missing some context for the conversation. You know, the the wife and the children were running around. The dog was barking. So we were having a a great freewheeling conversation about things that were useful and productive and important and professional, but in in an environment, in a context that were completely not professional and made us seem. Just slightly out of sorts, really. So it got me to thinking about how we watch our societies have, for example, this Ma Elian Monastery, the churches, or the factories, or the sports stadiums. These are more than just places; they're icons. They are centers for us to have our rituals, for us to. Store our symbols and also to perpetuate the myths of great sporting heroes or great staff. This is why, of course, you know, the Steve Jobs office is still left just as it was, or the— in the Morgan factory, the, the Peter Morgan's office is still left in the, in the way that it was. So as we think about our teams this week, wherever they are, just thinking from a communications perspective and an energization— that's not a word— the how we energize our staff and our teams and our clients as well, and our partners. How could we represent the symbols of our factory or our restaurant or our church or our hospital or whatever venue we provide our service How can we maybe create symbols? Can we send tokens? Can we send background logos? Can we send t-shirts? Can we send fluffy toys? Whatever it is, what can we do that starts to help people to re-engage and feel that there are some symbols, there are some icons that they can touch base with? Because maybe fatigue isn't just about the loss of energy caused by sitting at the screen, but it's also the lack of energy because where we are working right now is not imbibed, it's not infused with energy. Our circumstances are not energized because most of us are working alone trying to counter the environment that we've got with family and small people or maybe lodgers with us. So we're not in an environment that's giving us energy or support. So as a company, if we're responsible for those people working in those environments, I just wonder, could we start to send logos? Could we send company-branded material? Could we send cups and mugs or even lunch kits to our staff, the sort of materials we might have in our canteens? In the strictest sense possible, myths are not true, which is why we have the the choice of the word myth. Instead, they're stories told of and by our members of the community. But today I was hearing how the myth of the fourth century saint who had founded the Mar Elian Monastery in Syria had bound people together. It had given them a sense of purpose. And a sense of energy and to withstand amazing pressures and physical, uh, physical harm. So as we look to lead our organizations and our people around us and to encourage and inspire those people to dedicate themselves to work, I'm personally thinking about what rituals What symbols and what myths can I create to make everybody feel that this is a worthwhile organization, that East West PR is somewhere that they can believe in? It has a mission, it has a purpose, and it can give guidance when there may be an absence of guidance in other places. All of us are under a lot of pressure, but this is when we also can show great leadership. And leadership will come as we all look deep within us, look forward, and decide what's important. And as we were all surrounded by our families today, this fellow father and I, what we realized, of course, is that is what's important to us. Now, how to turn the background where we have them with us into a productive and a compelling workplace. So with that, I'd like to say thank you for listening to this episode of Speak PR, and like to wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on communicating. Thank you.
