Scourge of IT

Basically that means that the company I work for now allows me to spend an increasingly larger amount of time working out of my home office, when I’m not travelling on company business and meeting my colleagues and my clients face-to-face.

The same stinky T-shirt or your underwear

That means that during nobody cares if you sit around all day in the same stinky T-shirt or your underwear, or if you neglect your personal hygiene for days on end until your spouse or significant other complains about your ripeness, you’re as well expected to respond pretty quickly to emails and phone calls and instant messages.

Now, I understand why we need periodic conference calls. It allows us to have that form of contact which would if not take place of in-person meetings at the workplace, and to voice concerns and set agendas and deliverables and check statuses and to have that “human” element in other words otherwise missing from electronic correspondence.

But as I have had more and more of my travel reduced, and more and more of my work is occurring at home, I’ve been finding that I’ve had to participate in more and more conference calls.

The findings of the previous conference call

I’ve been having conference calls that end up resulting in additional conference calls to discuss the findings of the previous conference call, and at the time having more conference calls that are required with another group of people because some folks got left out of the loop either purposely or accidentally and at once we have to utterly or partially re-cap them.

It doesn’t matter if 20 email chains go back and forth that summarize the calls, the conferences never seem to end.

Do you know how I realize that conference calls are becoming a serious problem? I have three VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) handsets that I have dedicated to my business line. It’s not unusual for me to completely chain-smoke the charging on all three handsets for a 10 or 12 hour workday, of which 70 to 80 percent of that day is dedicated to conference calls.

Let’s say, to illustrate that I have three conference calls scheduled for that day. That’s pretty much typical for me. They’re each supposed to go only one hour.

Half hour over

But now they are all going meanwhile a half hour over, because of either unfinished business from the previous call(s) or because we’ve invited too many people and at that time some other item or person ends up monopolizing the call until we as a matter of fact get down to the business that the call was supposed to be about.

And because they go too long, people inevitably have to drop to go to other calls, which means they get out of the loop again and at that time the entire horrible process has repeat again, and again, and again.

It’s as a matter of fact gotten to the point that the calls are going so long that they are overlapping into other scheduled calls. And that isn’t counting the unscheduled, “ad-hoc” fire-fighting calls that could occur at any time.

So now I’m bouncing between scheduled calls and unscheduled calls pretty much non-stop. And now my co-workers have had to make up code words for when we need to take bathroom breaks while the calls, like “I need to go make some tea”.

I don’t have a solution to this problem other than that I think that conference calls should never, ever exceed an hour in length, and nobody should be forced to sit on them back-to back. Every call should have a set agenda with specific goals in mind, and going off-tangent should not be permitted. And there’s all the same a law of diminishing marginal returns when it comes to total number of attendees.

Jason Perlow, Sr. Innovation Editor at ZDNet, is a technologist with over two decades of experience integrating large heterogeneous multi-vendor computing environments in Fortune 500 companies.

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