At the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2019, TechRepublic’s Teena Maddox spoke with Zoom CIO Harry Moseley about the use of Zoom video conferencing and how it affects employees and companies. The following is an edited transcript of the interview.
Harry Moseley: How does Zoom change the culture of a company? Zoom changes the culture of a company by enabling people to meet locally, nationally, and globally on any device, anywhere, at any time. The true magic called Zoom is our ability to produce high-quality, high-definition video as well as high-quality audio, all-encompassing with things like recording, easy content share from a mobile device, from your laptop, or in a room.
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In a room, you have no dongles, you have no codes—you just go into the room and you just start instantly sharing off of the voice. By seeing your colleague, it’s what I call an immersive experience because people connect and can not just hear the words and hear the tone, but they can see the body language. And as we all know, body language tells us everything.
If you’re making a presentation and people like the presentation and people agree, they tend to nod, and if they don’t, they tend to shake their heads. If they like things, they tend to smile, and if they don’t, they tend to grimace. And so the Zoom platform, the way I characterize it, we do one-to-one and one-to-a-million and everything in between.
Large meetings with 1,000 people, webinars with 50,000 webcasts, two million. It allows the executives at the top of the organization to be able to communicate down to every employee in the entire organization on a global scale. That makes a dramatic difference in culture because that creates trust across an organization as well as collaboration.
It reduces turnover, increases productivity, increases collaboration, which ultimately increases the top line and reduces the bottom line, so your operating income goes up. It increases loyalty from the employees such that they stay with the company because they understand the mission that they are on. Those are a lot of different elements [that go into] how Zoom changes the culture in the company.
I think there’s a large push these days across all organizations to have a distributed workforce. A distributed workforce is hiring the talent, wherever that talent is, and not necessarily having them relocate. As we all know, there are more jobs than there are people, so hiring the talent, hiring the best athlete, hiring the most qualified person is paramount. Not necessarily in your locale, but because of a platform like Zoom, you can hire them in their little town, and they can be included.
If you look at myself as an example, I know I’m just an individual, but I’m based in New York City. I’m connected with my colleagues literally all over the planet, and I don’t feel disconnected, I don’t feel remote. I don’t feel any different than if I was working in an office with them because I get to see them all the time through a great video platform.
We [were] doing a fireside chat this morning with the CIO for one of our clients here at the Gartner conference as an example, and he was talking about how Zoom has become so popular that they’re actually seeing the utilization of their offices go down, and so they’re reevaluating their office space.
We see many clients do that in many organizations, not just because of the capability of Zoom, but they’re creating a better work-life balance for their employees, giving them choices. I read on the weekend in an article how another company is adopting a work-from-home schedule on Fridays and Mondays.
Other organizations provide that sort of flexibility to people–young families with kids coming home from school, or grown adults who are taking care of a parent at home, or things of that nature. So the Zoom platform and the mobility component of it–working from all sorts of devices, anywhere, anytime–is definitely changing the work balance, the work life and have people work in a distributed fashion.
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