I’ve blogged recently about the way that “digital twin” and “metaverse” technology could revolutionize the way that “blue-collar” or “non-carpeted” parts of the workforce. I noted that most IT projects have focused on office workers, for the simple reason that class of worker is a direct information producer and user, and so easier to empower with tech. There’s more to be gained by focusing efforts on under-served pieces of the workforce, but that doesn’t mean that office work doesn’t still merit attention. The question is whether anything could be expected to enhance productivity enough to justify investment by buyers and create profit for sellers. There are two things that might, as we’ll see.
Wall Street research recently noted that companies like Zoom and Microsoft (with Teams) are working to become the center of a new collaborative paradigm. The implication is that this will make these companies a center of how office workers are empowered, but is that true? Like a lot of stuff in tech, there are arguments to be made on both sides, and here there are two questions to be addressed. First, just how much “carpeted” effort is expended on collaboration, relative to total worker activity? Second, how do these workers actually collaborate? Finally, how much real change is there in collaborative requirements?
What is “collaboration” anyway? Enterprises I’ve talked with tend to view it as “the process of exchanging views for the purpose of exploring options and making decisions.” That suggests that management and planning people are the ones who collaborate, and in the US they make up roughly a sixth of the workforce. For the rest of the workforce, collaborative tools would likely have minimal impact on their productivity. However, half of that group of people are “non-carpet” workers, ones whose current IT empowerment is limited and who are actually the targets of any “digital-twin” empowerment strategy. Overall, no more than 8% of the workforce are both collaborative and equipped for IT augmentation of their collaborative process. That’s about 18 million workers in the US.
How do these people collaborate? That question raises the first opportunity in the collaboration space.
The first part of that rather complex question is what the “social scope” for the collaboration is, meaning how many people are involved and where they’re located relative to one another. According to enterprise data I’ve collected for several decades, two-thirds of collaboration involves only two workers. That’s important because through that entire period, all the research (mine and even university studies) has shown that there is no demonstrable value to video augmentation of pairwise meetings. The only thing that’s needed is an audio link and a way of viewing any material in synchrony. The value of video, and what I’ll call “organized” collaboration, really in what we could call “meetings”, which according to enterprises would typically involve about a half-dozen workers. That makes up only 14% of all collaboration, though it does involve half the 18 million workers who collaborate.
Enterprises say, with almost no exceptions, that the ideal setting for meetings is face to face. We have meeting rooms for that reason, and we also tend to house workers who interact closely in the same facilities. Why are there more people in a company headquarters than in other business sites? Because the headquarters location collects those who are likely to need to meet. Companies have tended to address workers who aren’t physically collected by need to collaborate through things like conference calls, and this worked for decades.
The thing that made Teams and Zoom essential, of course, was work from home, but even that true statement needs a bit of refinement. It’s not all work from home that mattered, it’s work from home for those workers who had been collected and were meeting face to face. Yes, both tools have been and are being used for pairwise interactions (I do video calls all the time, and even though the video often doesn’t work, the interaction doesn’t change). No, they’re not making those interactions better, and so in the real sense it’s that 18% of collaboration that’s made up of real F2F meetings that have to be considered targets for any real productivity gains.
What does this mean? I think the real takeaway is that you can’t make a video collaborative system impactful enough to really change the way office workers do their work. You can make it possible to extend collaboration beyond F2F, but that’s valuable mostly when workers are used to F2F and can’t physically meet because everyone isn’t co-located. The video collaborators are former F2F collaborators , and co-location or return-to-work is still the goal for most companies, most jobs. That means that video tools aren’t going to change office productivity on a large scale.
Zoom, according to Wall Street, wants to make its software “the operating system for collaboration across the enterprise”. If “the enterprise” is the large companies, the move back to the office means more F2F, which means Zoom would have to push pairwise collaboration. Do they have a shot at doing that? The answer, I think, is that they do not, unless they decide to become a lot more like Microsoft.
Microsoft is the only player who can really hope to transform office work, because Microsoft has the most credible position in creating and maintaining the assets that are both the inputs and outputs of collaboration, the documents. Whether we print documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, exchange them as files, or give them over a video link, the documents are part of virtually every collaboration. Absent a decisive position in the document space, neither Zoom nor any other “collaboration” player can really move the ball much unless WFH becomes a lot more widespread than it was even during COVID.
Other information assets, such as reports generated by applications or even application screens, could also be the centerpiece of a collaboration, and in pairwise collaboration this type of asset is involved in about a third of all interactions. Screen sharing is a logical way to support co-viewing of non-document assets, and my research says that there would be a value to having a screen-sharing tool that focused exclusively on pairwise collaboration. That could be done without central servers and software, which means that something like that could be added in theory to an open-office tool.
Another interesting point here is that pairwise collaboration totally dominant in the SMB space. Only 20% of all businesses are multi-site businesses, with two-thirds of those having less than 5 sites. This group of SMBs employ collaboration primarily between a main location and what’s essentially a set of mobile workers. Tools to target the pairwise collaborator, augmenting perhaps an open-source document suite, could be a major market winner, but a relationship between those tools and the document software is essential if this is to be valuable to buyers.
Ideally, you’d want the tool to support collaborative editing, and this is in fact available in LibreOffice (for example), though the feature isn’t used as often as it could be. Google Docs and Apple iWork both support collaborative editing too, and in both these suites it’s used more often. However, nobody really positions collaborative editing as a primary requirement for collaboration (ironically), and none of these tools have features to facilitate screen-sharing for applications rather than for documents. Still, the capabilities are in place and it wouldn’t take anything other than some tweaks and marketing to realize a pairwise collaborative suite built around them.
The problem may be that very readiness, though. It would be so easy to create a toolkit that it might prove difficult to monetize one. Then there’s the fact that half of all workers are employed by firms with over 500 workers, which means firms that probably do have meetings and thus probably use Teams or Zoom. That would likely mean the firms would simply adopt Teams/Zoom overall, and that would mean half the workers would be off the table with regard to collaborative enhancements or new market entrants. We’re going to have to look deeper at worker distributions and collaboration models to see what might be possible.
The distribution of workers by size of company is important if we want to assess collaborative opportunities overall. Only 4% work for businesses with under 5 employees and only 17% work for companies with 20 employees or less. Companies with more than 500 employees make up only roughly 20 thousand of the 6.8 million business sites, but as just noted, account for over half of total employment. Until a company gets at least 100 employees there’s little chance they really have distributed office locations; smaller ones tend to use worker home offices as satellite locations.
All that suggests first that current Teams/Zoom tools cover most workers who actually need formal “collaboration”, and second that viable target firms are surely highly targeted already. Collaborative growth would then depend on more collaboration per company, and given that WFH seems to be winding down, it’s hard to say where that could come from. One possibility, of course, would be some specific toolkit focused more on “content collaboration”, but that would have to overcome the problems with the easy availability of office-package-integrated options. Adding in a general screen-sharing capability would be one potential approach.
The operative words here are (as usual) the qualifiers. “Potential” needs to be realized, and when you pare down the collaborative space to two-party relationships to capture the largest possible number of collaborative episodes, you trivialize the tools needed. WFH changed collaboration, but the WFH pressure is now reversing. In the end, then, Zoom may be on the wrong track with its business plan.
Or maybe not, because we have to come back to the point of how workers are distributed by the size of their employer. Large companies employ a slight majority of workers, period. Large companies are the rightful home of meetings (whether they’re productive or not) and thus the place where tools like Zoom would be applied. Large companies’ workers still collaborate in pairwise mode more often than in the meeting mode, so there is growth opportunity if Zoom could move into the pairwise collaboration space.
How? They only have two options. First, they could fork one of the open-source office suites and integrate it with their own tools. That’s a significant effort. Second, they could create a relationship between any popular document suite and their tools, and then use that relationship to expand and enhance pairwise collaboration. That seems possible, but it begs the question of just what the expanded and enhanced tools might look like. If Zoom is serious, then it is going to have to define the future course of collaboration in order to monetize it.
What about our second thing? It turns out that as many as 40% of all workers who could be empowered via collaboration are almost ignored in the current collaborative thrust. Call them “blue collar” if you like, but they’re the ones actually involved in the production and distribution of goods. The challenge with them, as I’ve noted in earlier blogs, is that the real world frames their jobs. They can’t tailor job activity to match application facilitation, the application has to come to them. Their work requires synchronization between applications and the real world.
In the longer term, it’s probable that collaborative success will require tapping in to that “digital twin” or “metaverse” technology to pull in the workers who aren’t chained to desks. It’s possible to enhance desk collaboration by maximizing pairwise benefits, but that’s gilding the lily because it’s obvious that collaborative editing or coding will provide the majority of the addressable benefits. To get new money, you need new blossoms, and the potential for that is limited for desk-bound workers. The broader opportunities need a different vision for sure.
