Bridging the gap in remote communication | Mike Figliuolo, Part 2

You know, you brought up this, this thing about. And it's one of our predictions, people taking roles outside of their geography. We're saying in sales, geographies will matter less. Right. Because you can service customers remotely. And I want to, I want to dig into that for a minute because this is a trend and it's something that happened to me this week. I was sharing with you that I'm part of the Downtown Development Authority for Roswell, and we're making very key strategic decisions for the development of our city. And since the pandemic, I mean, we haven't met in person at all in 2020. We met this week for the first time and it was in person and we were socially distanced. We were in a room, a big U shape. It was a huge room for seven people. But anyway, we got more done in that meeting, though, and were able to connect on some very key decisions that before on Zoom, we weren't quite able to come to consensus. And I would love to hear a little bit about from your perspective. You're a great communicator, your perspective on how you can bridge that gap. Because we are believing that face to face is still something magical happens, something different happens that doesn't happen over Zoom. What do you, what do you think about that, Mike?

Yeah, I think some of the face to face, you're. You're never going to be able to replicate in Zoom because the micro expressions, the gestures, some of the sounds, you know, when people are on mute, you don't hear them sigh with that exasperated sign like, hey, you know, hang on a minute, Michelle, it sounds like you got a point. If you're on mute, I don't know that you just went right. So by default, just not having that physical proximity, it's going to be hard to pick up on those cues. That said, I think as people get more comfortable with the medium and being on camera and knowing, hey, the camera's up here, it's not down on the bottom of your screen and you should not be muted. When you try and talk, people are finding it a little bit more normal. I think the other thing you're finding is people are allowing themselves to be themselves now. Right. So a lot of times when people see themselves on camera, the reaction in the past was, I hate the way I look. And they start obsessing about it, and then all of a sudden the mask goes on and I have to look a certain way and I have to behave a certain way. And what we've taken out is the authenticity and the ability to connect. Now people are just. You know what? I think they're so freaking tired of being on zoom. They're just being like, hey, this is me today. What do you got? And guess what? Those barriers are starting to fall. So I think it's getting a lot easier to make those personal connections. You'll never bridge that entire gap, but I think slowly, over time, we are bridging it. And, you know, myself included, the first few times that I taught class, normally when I teach, I'm in a classroom in front of 20, 30 people for a full day, and you have that vibe, you have that energy going on. The first times I taught virtually, it was like, if I was a participant, I would have been like, you know, this guy's, like, a little bit stiff, and you know, what's going on here. And as we've gotten more comfortable with the platform, myself and my other instructors, it's just like, all right, let's have fun. Let's joke, you know, and it's just so much more personable. So I think that trend is going in the right direction. People are getting more comfortable, but you're right, we're never going to get entirely there beyond the face to face.