At some point, many people will return to office life, at least part time. How do you think that'll affect work behavior and the tools for it (Slack, Zoom, etc.)?
What product features would you hope the vendors would add in preparation for that eventuality?
For example... For the last year, we all have had “one connection, one face on screen.” That’s given everyone a kind of equality, where we each have an equal seat at the table. (With or without cat filters.) Now we have to contemplate returning to an environment where SOME people are in the office, and thus huddled around a conference table, and the rest of the team is working from home. It was like that in the Before Times, but now everybody is more cognizant of the disadvantages… not the least of which is the poor video organization in conference rooms. Few companies are smart enough to install a camera that’s pointed at the people around the conference table, for instance, however simple/cheap an option that is.
I was actually building an office environment that worked like that before COVID was on the radar. We had done it successfully for a while by simply doing what we do now in a WFH world: everyone signs into video on their laptops. There's simply no substitute for it.
If you're the person stuck looking at a conference room through a camera, you naturally have a very different dynamic because you're just a face on a screen for the group while they're an entity of multiple. You lose a lot without the face-to-face connection you get with everyone being in the room together, or everyone having their own video feed in a virtual meeting.
So even if 9/10 people were in the room, we had everyone join the video call independently from their laptops. They could still look up at each other in the room and look right at their machines when the remote person was speaking. One person in the room ran the audio while everyone else was totally muted, and we used some Jabra bluetooth speaker/mic devices that sat in the middle of the table and picked up and broadcasted to the whole room.
At this point, our only limiting factor was our corporate network's low bandwidth, but upping it to 1Gbps and better networking gear was the solution for that.
I don’t think we’ll be particularly affected, since we support a spent fuel storage facility, and often need to come into work to do walk downs, work with operations, etc (in addition to attendant issues with classified matter and radiological work). I think we’ll mostly go back to doing what we’ve done before; although I could see us doing our division safety meetings virtually. We don’t tend to video chat (our computers don’t have webcams), but we do use audio conferencing.
We were doing one laptop per person in meetings before the pandemic to support our remote workers. If remote continues to be supported "post pandemic", then I would expect this to continue in good workplaces.
However, I believe it will be years before working in the office is the norm again for tech people. I don't expect us to go back during the 2020s