Advances in Remote Work Could Significantly Alter the Communication Hierarchy

In the recent award-winning Korean movie, ‘Parasite’, there is a scene where a family living in a basement decides to fold flat pizza boxes at home to get some income. The scheme ends with lots of incorrectly folded pizza boxes and ultimately underpayment for the family.

The idea of working from home is not new and lots of schemes were advertised and participated in throughout the pre-internet twentieth century. Stuffing envelopes, licking stamps, folding pizza boxes etc.

The schemes often promised more than they delivered primarily because the rewards were based on inflated outputs. Like licking and sticking 1000 stamps for 5 dollars and no saliva.

What makes the current pandemic situation so tough is that it came as a complete surprise to everyone. Up ending routines and social activities in such a way that not many people would recognize. To fully remember the last serious or major global disruption, i.e. the last World War, you would have to be going on 95 – 100 years of age.

So a lot of this is new and some instances unreal.  Working from home was once seen as a perk, now it is standardized. The challenge here is not every house, apartment, room, garage can accommodate this new standardization.

We could argue at length what are the positives and negatives of working remotely, but whatever the next steps are that we collectively make, humans have an innate way of adapting to change.

This is a blog about the potential transformation of consumer trends in software, specifically, live broadcasting and celebrity engagement platforms into new enterprise software forms. The effect will be to radically alter the communication hierarchy, particularly where remote based working environments have become the norm.

Often company leadership communication is done via email or via a presentation, on an all-hands call or once a year at a sales kick-off and it is typically in line with what the company is doing and striving for. It is also typically a one-way piece of communication.

Employees drink in the KoolAid and then chat among themselves about the merits of such a strategy. In modern office environments, communication typically mimics the look and feel of the office and the general culture at the company. Laidback environment and culture, laid back communication.

This is now dead. Why? Because culture only exists when people can engage it, participate in it, create it. If you are a node on the end of a network, at home, via your laptop, in your pyjamas, you are not in an office culture. You are a node.

Remote Work, Communication – What’s Changing?

Your new culture is your home and its environs. Corporate motivational posters look away now. An emoji, a new word I just invented  to act as the singular of emoji, can’t communicate that your boss neglects you and only manages upwards, the way a physical look to a knowing colleague in the office can.

When we lose these moments, we lose the humanity of working alongside one another. At home, alone, working as a node on the end of a network, office culture dies from the slow strangulation of propinquity.

The challenge for office leadership communication is now not only how can you sustain or recreate company culture where none exists, but also how can you communicate more effectively to lonely nodes on the end of the network in a way that builds a new remote culture. This will be achieved by what this blogger head calls cameo culture.

When we watch Kim Khardashian deliver an Instagram live video on the benefits of her latest trend or follow a celebrity on TikTok, we get a level of intimacy that a gossip magazine or music video or interview on TMZ could never compete with. This style of engagement creates loyal followers who hang on the episodic nature of the content.

In Society 3.0 the workplace is moving toward a consumer cultural phenomena that the celebrity engagement platform Cameo has already successfully commercialized. That platform offers access to celebrities that are otherwise out of reach to their globalized fan base.

You can message the celebrity and pay them to repeat or relay your message. Typically these messages are birthday wishes or congratulatory in nature, laced with the personality of the celebrity in question. Snoop Doggs’ are particularly Shizzle.

The effect here is to offer access where none existed, to offer intimacy that was previously impossible and most crucially to demolish the talent hierarchy that exists between the celebrity/fan dynamic.

Society 3.0 will have banks of people inculcated into an easy access culture via Instagram, TikTok or Cameo and in the same way private social networks like Salesforce.com’s Chatter tool have taken over the enterprise with a Facebook look-a-like user experience. Or Loom has successfully mimicked the short form Snapchat-esque video for business.

Fans and users of Cameo and Instagram Live will expect a level of intimacy that seemed way out of bounds 5 years ago as they mature into the workforce. This is even more prevalent in a remote working culture that has house plants and pajamas as icons.

So how would this work? A CEO can’t be picking up requests to wish happy birthday to every employee and of course they wouldn’t either. But rather than trying to mimic the exact consumer version of the Cameo platform the business version could re-imagine it.

Directors, managers and employees could have workplace credits instead of money that they use only for special occasions to elicit messages from the senior leadership team. Examples could be ten-year work anniversaries, the closing of a huge deal for the company, or a plain ‘well done’ for going above and beyond.

These video messages would have the effect of creating a digital bound culture that could be shared internally to further enhance its currency and by extension further intertwining a digitized remote working culture into your home. And don’t say it too loudly, these messages would be one way pieces of communication.

With so much of our lives being online now, communication has been commoditized, and creating a remote digitized office culture will be the norm in Society 3.0.