Cool features for virtual offices
I’ve written before about how lots of us work in “virtual offices” now which are actually stacks of software like Teams/Sharepoint/Jira or Slack/Zoom/Linear or whatever, and how these tools are generally not very good offices to inhabit.
I was shlepping along in my Teams instance the other week and I thought of some cool features I want (additionally to multi-way screen sharing and ambient presence).
Cool features for collab virtual offices
Acronym/initialism hints
Say I’m writing “lmk” and some poor soul doesn’t know what it means. I could proactively highlight the word in my message, right click, and add a definition, “let me know”, which would go into my profile glossary.
Next time I write lmk, it would have little dotted lines underneath which will show you the definition when you hover.
You could use it to spread business knowledge by defining internal terms this way too. So you know what Steve means when he says you need to “Raise an INC in SN re RRA changes for LL+RP”… darn it, Steve.
Comms preferences in profile
I read a piece ages ago about the Obama Whitehouse and how all staffers circulated their “communications style memo” which detailed their comms likes/dislikes, down to whether they were pro-or-against emoji, bullets, platitudes, getting to the point succinctly, etc. Haven’t been able to find the article in a long time.
There are lots of popular views held by information workers nowadays, many of which have handy (if somewhat blunt) “websites as answers”. My favourite is No Hello.
We could have preferences attached to our profiles that list this stuff out using a mix of selectable items and free text.
Imagine you’re about to send someone “Hello” and their preferences include NO_HELLO - then you’d get a little warning + advice in a status bar next to the message input - just like when someone has an active status in Teams today.
🤔✅ Gary prefers messages that include the topic, like “Hello, could I schedule the cert change for tonight?”
Likewise with emoji, GIFs*, very short messages, very long messages, AI slop, etc.
How to detect these situations is left as an exercise for the implementer.
*Preserving Joy
Ok, the further I get through this post the more I sound like a totally unacommodating nark, so you should know that when someone sends me a “Hello!” I don’t actually just reply with “https://nohello.net”!
All human interactions in the virtual office are kind of precious, because we’re often engineered out of each other’s lives.
Really what we want to control is whether we’re getting and enjoying messages from the right people at the right times to preserve focus and complement team unity.
I think it’s worth screening some of this stuff at the recipient side, so if the sender is just trying to inject some joy (like a GIF), they don’t get slapped down, but someone who wants to reduce motion and distraction can filter that out automatically.
There are ways that these papercuts could be solved at recipient side in all cases instead of attempting to modify sender behaviour. An autoresponder could know my acronyms and initialisms and answer “lmk?” with “Let me know :)” and answer “Hello” with “Hi! You now have my undivided attention and I’m ready for your question! What’s up??” (kidding).
But, knowing that you were being screened by someone’s robot secretary would be its own black-mirror-ish problem.
We go forth! 🛃⛹️♂️