New ways of working: remote working, video meetings and shifts

Why can an hour of video calls leave people more worn out than an hour of meetings in a room? The lag gets the blame. In twenty twenty-one, a Stanford researcher, Jeremy Bailenson, proposed four other causes. Faces close up, all looking at you. Your own face, watching back. Sitting fixed in one spot. Harder work reading people through a camera. Video meetings save a flight. Is that better work? Better work or not, the answer waits until the gains and the costs have been weighed.

New technology has changed where and when people in design and manufacturing work. Remote working means working away from the office, from home or anywhere, with a laptop, fast broadband and files stored online. A designer at home can open the same CAD model, the computer drawing of the product, as the team and the factory, at the same moment. Video conference meetings put a client, the design team and a factory abroad in one call, with nobody travelling. What does a design team save when a review moves from a flight to a video call? The team saves flights, hotels, and days of staff time. And problems get seen and fixed in the same week, not on the next visit. Work can also be handed across time zones. A bike designed in Bristol can be checked by a factory in Taiwan while Bristol sleeps, with notes waiting in the morning. When people work changes too. Automated lines that run day and night still need people to supervise them, so staff work in shifts, round the clock. And online tools let office work happen at flexible hours. Put together, the gains are less commuting and travel cost, faster decisions, a wider pool of people to hire from, and work that carries on while another time zone sleeps. Now the other column: what is one drawback of working this way? Isolation, and a blurred line between home and work. Meetings at unsociable hours with a factory abroad. Reliance on a good connection. Confidential designs sent over the internet. And a sample nobody can hold through a camera.

Some questions turn this round and ask about a product that makes remote working possible. An answer about working from home in general misses that question, so every sentence must start from the product. Take a wireless headset with a boom microphone, an arm that brings the microphone close to the mouth. Noise-cancelling ear cups cut out the sound of a busy house, so the worker hears and is heard clearly on calls. The boom microphone picks the voice up clearly, so nobody asks them to repeat themselves. And a mute button on the ear cup cuts their sound instantly. Now a student writes about the same headset: it is wireless. How would you grow 'it is wireless' into a point about the worker? Wireless with a long battery life, which means they can move away from the desk and get through a day of calls on one charge. One examiner's report puts the problem in its own words. Many candidates failed to expand their answers to enable marks to be awarded, for example, they are portable, rather than, they are more lightweight and compact which means they are easily portable. Every time, the way to repair it is the same move: the feature, which means, then what it does for the person using it. Here is a different slip. A student writes about the meeting app: the chat, the shared files, the background blur. Where is the headset anywhere in that answer about the app? Nowhere. The app is software, not the product the question asked about. Every sentence has to start from a physical feature of the headset. A report on a question about a laptop records the same slip. Many candidates discussed Apps and software rather than the laptop itself which was not always creditable. A discuss question wants the other side as well. The battery can run out mid-meeting, and the headset only helps if the home internet is reliable. For a home worker with many calls, it is still worth having.

A longer question might ask you to discuss a change like this. A bike company in Bristol now holds its weekly design review with its factory in Taiwan by video conference, instead of flying out. Here is how one answer opens. What is wrong with opening on 'meetings can be held around the world'? Opening on that repeats what the question already gave. Discussing means saying what the change leads to: cost, time, time zones, and what a camera cannot show. The advantages first. No flights or hotels, so thousands of pounds and several days of staff time are saved each trip. Problems are seen and fixed in the same week. And both sides look at the same CAD model as they talk. What are two disadvantages of the video review for the bike company? For the bike company, a gap of seven or eight hours means someone meets very early or very late. And through a camera you cannot hold a sample frame, feel the paint finish or check a weld closely. A weak connection breaks up the meeting. And confidential new designs travel over the internet, so security matters. Then the judgement, tied to this company. Video meetings suit the weekly reviews, but the first production sample of a new bike still needs someone there to handle it. One examiner's report, on a video conferencing question, notes that in the cases where candidates scored well, they provided responses that were well balanced discussing both advantages and disadvantages of video conferencing. Balance is what to copy: one column of advantages, one of disadvantages, then a judgement that names the business in the question. That is the fix for a thin discussion.

The questions to close begin with a laptop.

How does a laptop's long battery life help a designer working away from the office? It lasts a full day, which means the designer can work on a train or at a client's office without stopping to charge. Now a factory line runs all night. What way of working does that bring with it? Shift patterns. People take turns to supervise the line round the clock, including at unsociable hours. Try the other side: what is one drawback of a designer working from home? Isolation, or a blurred line between home and work. And a sample cannot be handled at a distance. Another, back to the start: are video meetings better work, or just more tiring? Both columns are real. Video meetings save travel and speed up decisions, but they can wear people out and cannot replace handling a sample. For weekly reviews they win; for a first sample, someone still goes.

If you can weigh a new way of working and land a judgement, there's no need to see this twice, so mark it with the thumb. Otherwise save it; the critically evaluating video uses the same weighing, so it comes back round.

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