Zoom CEO says Zoom meetings hinder innovation and debate, wants employees back in the office

Johnny@feddit.de to Not The Onion@lemmy.world – 560 points – Zoom CEO says Zoom meetings hinder innovation and debate, wants employees back in the office
zdnet.com

Zoom, the videoconferencing platform that profited substantially from remote work during the pandemic, is now asking employees to return to the office. Its CEO, Eric Yuan, claims Zoom meetings don't let people build trust or be innovative.

[...]

Yuan explained that trust is essential "for everything," and he finds it hard to build not only that but also innovation and debates over Zoom.

"Quite often, you come up with great ideas, but when we are all on Zoom, it's really hard," Yuan said, according to Insider. "We cannot have a great conversation. We cannot debate each other well because everyone tends to be very friendly when you join a Zoom call."

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My guess: This guy, and all his rich friends have a ton of money invested in commercial real estate. He's putting his own interest before the interest of his company. The more people work from home the better for Zoom, but the worse off he and his rich friends are.

Or it's a way to lower the head count without doing layoffs. The problem with doing it this way of course is that you'll lose your best employees.

They don't care. They think once the initial build is complete you only need junior devs to maintain.

Wow that’s pretty cynical. Is it so hard to believe someone might not want their influence on the world to be negative?

People say that way of thinking is cynical, but I have worked in the system implementation and system consulting arms of EDS, IBM, and Accenture and that assumption (that the whole thing can be maintained by junior devs one the initial build is complete) is actually how middle managers within client companies have to budget their transition from "build" into "business as usual" stage so that senior managers approve the system implementation/migration.

While the concept that it takes specialized knowledge and experience is true, not having means to retain experience means that it will be chaos some six months down the road when some manager wants to do an enhancement as none of the juniors will understand why certain design choices were made and the implications on the rest of the architecture

Interesting that Zoom is not making an attempt to build features that increase trust, enable innovation and encourage robust debates in their app. Seems like a missed opportunity.

Evidently they couldn't figure out how to do it over zoom.

It's impossible to implement a feature that prevents employees from recording the zoom meetings when the boss is abusive robustly debating their employees.

To avoid headaches with HR, we're going to need you to come into the office so your boss can feel more free to robustly debate you from time to time.

Perhaps a C-suite with a healthy sense of the product’s niche could be seen as a feature. Having a target market that’s too wide is bad for product coherence.

The amount of "innovation and debate" I've seen during remote meetings is no different than when I used to work in an office. Meetings are either exhausting and dead (when they're the usual bullshit administrative meetings that no one wants to be in and could've been handled via email) or they're fun and engaging (when its something like a working session where the participants want to be there).

This guy is an idiot and, as others in this thread have already stated, he's got ulterior motives beyond "innovation and debate."

I've never seen a CEO this publically against their own business lmao

Him and his buddies must have large investments in commercial real estate. I can't possible think of another reason why he would willingly tank the company. Make as many short-term gains as possible then bail.

Her, personally, cannot handle remote communication methods and is projecting his inability onto everyone else. People that make it to CEO if large companies are used to in person communication without any possible recording of their behavior as they berate coworkers.

He is complaining about everyone being nice on zoom. He wants to not be nice.

This isn’t going to rank the company. It’s going to improve the company’s karma. Detatching from the least valuable use cases for your product is a good move because nothing fuels performance better than meaning, and customers who truly benefit from your product are a source of meaning, hence morale, hence attracting the best candidates, etc.

He’s exhibiting a trait known as ”honor” here, and it’s a successful strategy.

This isn’t against his business. This is against his business getting deeply enmeshed with a bunch of ineffective organizations.

A company has health just like a body has health. A healthy company will succeed long term, and selling to customers who either don’t need or are harmed by your product is a recipe for a sick company.

It's against his company because he's saying their clients are losing something by using their product. He can't pretend that it's exclusive to Zoom and all of his clients aren't affected.

That's the CEO saying "our product isn't good at what it was meant to do"... A good board would get rid of him ASAP.

No, he’s saying their clients are losing something by using their product too extensively.

You know how Soylent puts this on their bottles:

Soylent is not intended to replace every meal, but can replace any meal.

It’s a similar thing. They’re just being realistic about how the intention isn’t to eliminate food. And Zoom was developed with the intention to handle some business communication, not all.

I do this same thing. When a customer isn’t sure about some appliances they want to buy, I tell them to hold off. Sometimes I tell them to spend $20 and get a new dryer belt because I can tell they don’t need a $600 new dryer.

Is that “against my business” because I’m making a little less money that day? No. It’s for my business because my business isn’t just about optimizing today’s revenues. I want relationships. I want a trail of happy customers who have truly benefitted from doing business with me. I want people talking about how shopping with me was a good choice for them.

Me telling a customer they don’t need to buy the $600 dryer they came in to buy is a win. And this is evidenced by my massive sales numbers. People appreciate it when other people constrain themselves for their benefit.

What he’s doing is a powerful move that will result in his company’s success: he’s demonstrating a commitment to the truth, and a sense of his product’s place in a larger context. That’s rare, and highly valued, and it will help him win.

As I said in another reply to you, their stock is back down to pre pandemic level, what the CEO is doing will lower the demand for their product, thus lowering their stock even more.

So as I said, a responsible board would kick him out and find someone that wants to push for 100% remote work to set the example to increase demand for their product.

Yeah but isn't this more like you telling the customer that you don't personally use a dryer because you don't know how to make it work? Sure it's possible you know all of the mechanics of a dryer without knowing what the controls on the top do, but it doesn't really inspire a lot of confidence from the customer if you can't make the product you're selling work for yourself.

I wish everyone who works at zoom a very fruitful soft quitting.

This is all a method to get people to quit so they don't have to list layoff nor have to pay severance.

Fuck them. Go to the office, but give it your 10% at best. Stall things. Claim lack of motivated leadership if HR makes a stink. Make them fire you and get that bread in the meantime.

everyone tends to be very friendly when you join a zoom call

I'm sorry but are you suggesting hostility leads to innovation? Are you a fucking sociopath?

Are you a fucking sociopath?

Very likely. Capitalism encourages this type of behavior, to get (and stay) at the top you need to be a greedy, unhinged sociopath.

No, but I think he means that people hold back opposing ideas because of fear of hurting others. Then there are other group dynamics involved which suppress people expressing them selfies. I would have thought this wold be less of a problem in online meetings

This part is my favorite:

"Quite often, you come up with great ideas, but when we are all on Zoom, it's really hard," Yuan said, according to Insider. "We cannot have a great conversation. We cannot debate each other well because everyone tends to be very friendly when you join a Zoom call."

Sounds like the issue is people wanting to avoid a talking to by HR for being "uncooperative" to me, but what do I know, I'm not the CEO of a company actively portraying the company's product as bad at its sole purpose of existing.

For me it's like this, I have a useful point to add to the conversation but when I interject the lag is juuuuust long enough that it ends up I'm talking over the next person.

So when I lead a meeting with zoom participants I either force dead air to allow the remote people to jump in, or I eat as much dead air as possible to lock them out of the conversation. depending on my own agenda.

incidentally this problem doesn't exist in asynchronous collaboration methods. but zoom and it's like win out on shear informwtion bandwidth.

The current video conferencing and remote working systems are indeed amazing feats of technology and social acceptance, but we still need to work on it. a lot.

I'm definitely not pretending Zoom is perfect. It has issues. Not enough issues to make a return to office worthwhile for those who function far better from home, but issues.

I just think that if there's one person who has a huge state in pretending it is perfect, it should be this guy. And the most baffling part is that the issues he's making up are rooted in human behavior that would still be present in an office setting (like being too nice to avoid HR), not his tech.

The entirety of business being conducted over Zoom isn’t the company’s sole reason for existing, any more than the purpose of a toaster is so you can eat toast for every meal.

Consider Star Trek. When shit gets real, they beam over to talk.

I just love these near-daily reminders that the "new car smell" of kbin and lemmy is starting to wear off, as people stop being kind and fall back into old habits... like taking a flippant comment to its most extreme possible interpretation despite it being clear that wasn't even close to the intent.

The sole purpose of Zoom is to collaborate over long distances. The CEO of Zoom says it's too hard to build trust, innovate, or debate on Zoom. He didn't qualify the statement as "you can't build trust, innovate, and debate when all collaboration is done entirely on zoom," and neither did I. Taking it to that new context is the same as taking it out of context, intentionally, so that you can be right on the internet. Stop it. Bad commenter. Bad. Down.

I don’t really understand what you’re saying with talking to me like a dog.

Not every business interaction needs to be building trust, innovating, or debating. There are other valuable modes of communication such as reporting, inquiring, coordinating, and those work fine over Zoom.

The guy is not saying that Zoom has no use. He’s saying that Zoom does not fulfill all the communication functions of a business, and that some things (not all) are only possible in person.

Consider that star trek is fiction and not real life. It's a damn tv show.

Translation: I fucked up and want to beat the employees for my failure

This guy words his argument as though he's upset his product prevents him from having non-recorded temper tantrums at junior employees.

Yeah that's probably the most likely reason for this. Shitty managers bothered by the fact that yelling at employees over zoom makes it easy to report this abusive behaviour to HR.

"Quite often, you come up with great ideas, but when we are all on Zoom, it's really hard,"

Easy, close the company down.

Zoom needs to implement whiteboards and people need to be issued digitizing pens/tables so they can draw diagrams freely

Zoom has had a whiteboard since multiple years... But yeah, issuing tablets would make that feature more productive.

We cannot debate each other well because everyone tends to be very friendly when you join a Zoom call.

Translation: "I want to be a dick to people face to face, so they can't just turn the camera off and flip a bird towards the screen".

They can also be recorded, so if you really mess up, there is evidence.

Anyone who says you can’t debate over the Internet has never actually used the internet. Of the 10% that isn’t porn half of it is debates.

Eh, I think the majority of it that isn't porn is just scams of every variety imaginable. So I think it's just the 1% that isn't porn or scams (or both) is debates. But I get your point.

Zoom is dead in the water. They cannot innovate and this will cause them to fall further behind. Workers are more productive remote.

So just because he is psychotically social, everyone has to be?

This doesn’t seem to be maximizing shareholders’ investment. I give it three months before he “moves on to the next opportunity.”

Ah, the ancient art of 'Zoomology,' where gazing at colleagues' pixelated foreheads supposedly squashes innovation. Clearly, the key to groundbreaking ideas lies in the fluorescent lights and watercooler chitchat of the office jungle

Man that is pure class right there. I’m glad to see this. Someone who takes pride in their offering to the world, and only wants to see it used well.

I’ve discovered, in my first sales job, that it feels extremely good to put the customer’s needs first. I occasionally refer my customers to my competitor’s operation, when they’ve got the better deals.

It seems to work out well for me too. Nothing’s better than realizing you can be nice and succeed at the same time.

Take what he's saying to its logical conclusion and zoom usage will go back to pre pandemic level and the company will crash even lower than it's already did because its stock is back to pre pandemic price but with a whole lot more users.