Joe Fuller: Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m Harvard Business School professor and visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. This episode is one of the series of special dispatches on the sweeping effects of Covid-19 on our economy, society, and the future of work. In addition to our regular podcast episodes, we will be bringing you shorter and more frequent interviews with business leaders, policy makers, and leading scholars on the coronavirus.

The Covid-19 pandemic is exposing many people to video conferencing for the first time. More importantly, it has become—at least temporarily—the dominant vehicle for conducting meetings and the form in which decisions are made. Craig Malloy, CEO of Lifesize, has worked in the medium for nearly three decades. Over the course of his career, he’s seen the technology evolve from one that was exclusively available to large companies and government agencies reach down to serve medium-sized businesses and even consumers. How, and how well, are companies using video-conferencing technology to meet the unprecedented needs of today’s pandemic? How will companies’ widespread use of the technology affect their ongoing business processes after the pandemic? We’ll discuss those questions on this Covid-19 dispatch from the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. Craig, welcome to our podcast.

Craig Malloy: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Fuller: Craig, I think one of the consequences of the pandemic is that virtually everybody now has some experience with video conferencing, even if they’re still relative novices. There are a lot of different services out there. Tell us a little bit about Lifesize and how your offers are getting used by consumers.

Malloy: Sure. Lifesize, we’re primarily a B2B solution, although certainly we’ve had some consumer usage. But we primarily market our service to businesses and professional organizations around the world. We offer a cloud-based video-communication solution that can be used anywhere in the world—desktop, mobile, downloadable clients, or a browser-based application, as well as conference-room systems for businesses. I think we all remember office buildings. And when we used to go to the office, there were these things called conference rooms, and we used to sit in them and have meetings. And hopefully that will come back. But that is part of our business as well.

Fuller: So you really do the whole spectrum, from an individual consumer with a complementary download app all the way through to big conference rooms that accommodate dozens of people.

Malloy: Yes, that’s kind of one of the unique things about Lifesize, is we offer an entire solution for a professional organization—for desktop and mobile, as well as conference room—and then tie it all together with service and support.

Fuller: I know it’s still early in this pandemic, and that, as was once famously said, “Never make predictions, especially about the future.” But there’s quite a lot of speculation about how this wrenching, hard-stop experience is going to affect how businesses’ structure works, specifically remote work. What impressions are you gaining from talking to your customers and colleagues on that question?

Malloy: Well, I think that is absolutely true. One of the folks in our marketing department a few weeks ago mentioned to me, as we were putting together our marketing plan for the year was, the future of work arrived yesterday. And we all got just slammed into this work from home in mid- March. Lifesize, as we assessed the pandemic, one day I was talking to our VP of HR, and we said, “It’s probably time for us all to move home for a while.” And that was early to mid-March. And all of a sudden, Lifesize on our own became a work-from-home company. And we were put in the same situation as all of our customers around the world. And it’s interesting, because Lifesize, although we facilitate all of this remote work, that’s our business, we were primarily an office-based culture. Most of our folks lived relatively close to our office in Austin and commuted in. And we had some work-from-home days and that sort of thing. But all of a sudden, we were completely reliant on our own technology to run our business, and we really got a taste of what completely remote organizations do. So it’s been an interesting experiment for us to fully put ourselves in the shoes of all of our customers. And we have to operate exactly the same way.

Fuller: Craig, as you were starting to live the life of your customer, were there any surprises for you, or two or three key takeaways about how Lifesize is going to need to change or accommodate to a more-remote style of work, and is that extendable to your customers?

Malloy: Well, what we found was, I guess our previous experience was, we had a good mix of usage on our servers of conference rooms and desktop and mobile. You could even say that the anchor of our service was conference room usage, bringing in remote workers, and people who were traveling and customers and vendors and that sort of thing. But all of a sudden, the usage on our service radically changed, both for our customers and us, to almost exclusively desktop and mobile usage as a work-from-home application. In retrospect, I guess that was expected. But while it was happening, it was like, “Wow, this is kind of crazy.” The usage on our service went up, in terms of number of calls happening, went up about 9x over the space of three weeks …

Fuller: Wow!

Malloy: ... around the world. And we run our service on Amazon, AWS, the public cloud, the big AWS service. And we and they have very sophisticated tools for real-time monitoring of what’s happening. And you could see this radical shift to work from home traverse the globe. It started with our Asia-Pac customers in Japan and in Australia in late February, and then all of a sudden Europe spiked in very early March, because we have a really big business in Southern Europe, Italy, Spain, France. And then you could see the wave wash into the United States when our US-based customers started working from home. And it was really challenging to make sure that we had everything buttoned up to not have any service interruptions. At one point, we were just about to overrun the capacity in the AWS data center in Frankfurt, which is kind of crazy to think about.

Fuller: Wow!

Malloy: Yeah. And we had to have an emergency over the weekend, spin up an entirely new Amazon instance in their data center in Ireland. And it just goes to show you the flexibility and power of these public-cloud services. And what would companies have done if this pandemic happened 10 years ago, when none of this technology was in place? The technology that’s available for remote work and video communication—in terms of the public-cloud infrastructure and the availability of bandwidth and the processing power in mobile devices and computers to process the video in a quality way—businesses would’ve come to an absolute screeching halt. Because of what’s happened in the technology advancements in the last few years, many companies that were primarily composed of knowledge workers didn’t miss a beat.

Fuller: So, Craig, as these companies started to move pretty quickly and necessarily to video conferencing, did they bump into any ugly surprises, or were there barriers to implementation that were surprises to them or to you?

Malloy: I think these are probably things that our customers were thinking about in the future. Here’s a couple of examples. We’ve had this big surge of customers in county courthouses around the United States to do remote arraignment, to do remote hearings, both for user licenses, desktop and mobile users, as well as conference room systems. And there have been a lot of that, those uses over the past years. That’s not a new application or use case. But in March and April, we saw just a real surge of those small county courthouses all around the United States all of a sudden, like, “Oh my gosh. I can’t come into the courthouse. In order to keep the population of our jails safe and everybody else safe, we need to do this remotely. I’ve got to get this turned up.” A lot of state and local governments involved in the delivery of health care—and not just the United States, with all over Europe as well—so state and local governments are these essential services, but they need to completely change the way that they work as well. And I’m certain that these were things that were on those organizations’ long-range planning—that like, “Oh, yeah, we’re going to do this in 2021 as the budget allows.” But all of a sudden they needed to do it right now. And so it was interesting to see. And then on the contact-center side also, there was a lot of contact-center employees. I’m sure we’ve all had these experiences where we’re trying to buy something or trying to contact somebody, calling into a company, and you’re just on hold forever. I think a lot of that is companies who were using contact-center technology that required the employee to be in a cubicle three feet away from his fellow employee, and that’s just not possible right now. So all of a sudden, contact centers for customer success and support are running at one-third or one-quarter capacity, because the technology that they have in place doesn’t allow those people to work effectively from home. And that’s what the other half of our business at Lifesize does. We just merged with a company called Serenova in the contact-center space that allows contact-center employees to work from home. So there’s been a big surge in getting an acceleration in trying to move contact-center agents to their homes to be safe.

Fuller: Craig, has the way companies used your technology been pretty uniform globally, or do you see different patterns of traffic, different usage, different adoption rates?

Malloy: Yeah. Video communication historically has been used for more-formalized meetings—board meetings with remote board members, or a weekly staff meeting, or a sales forecasting meeting when your sales team is remote, or a remote interview, or a roadmap review, engineering roadmap review, those kinds of things. But now, all of the office interactions take place over video. There’s no more, you see your colleague on the way to the kitchen to get a banana, and you have a three-minute conversation about something that’s going on with the marketing plan. Everything’s a little bit more formalized and scheduled, and I’ve actually found my days fill up more with scheduled conversations and meetings, because you don’t get that spontaneous interaction of just management by walking around your office.

Fuller: Right.

Malloy: So in some ways, it’s kind of tiring. I thought, “Well, working from home’s not going to be that bad.” But by the end of the day, if you’re on seven hours of video calls, and there’s no more five-minute conversations—everything is 20 minutes now, because you haven’t seen that person—so it changes the human interaction and dynamic. But for someone who’s been in the video-communication business, this has been my career for 25 years. And so it’s been fun, and I’ve had the opportunity to take part in multiple companies and technology progressions to get to this point. So it’s been fun to see it go from a very early-adopter, rudimentary technology, to something that’s just completely mainstream that everybody uses for workouts or for happy hours—and not to mention business meetings.

Fuller: The history of remote work is a little bit like that old joke about Brazil, that Brazil would be the country of the future and always would be.

Malloy: Yeah.

Fuller: If we go back to the ’90s and 2000s even, you had companies offering remote-work positions, relying on what we used to call “telecommuting.” And it always proved to be a bit of a letdown—what actually happened. Do you think the technology has gotten far enough so that we can revisit the notion that people have to be in physical proximity to get the level of both the collaboration and interaction they need to function, but also the amount of emotional reinforcement? One of the things that was clearly a detriment to the adoption of remote work has been that work’s kind of a sociological, anthropological phenomenon. People value being together and value colleagueship. And that’s how teams form and relationships deepen and ultimately high-performing companies function.

Malloy: Yeah. It’s been an interesting experiment in that, obviously, as big a proponent I have been for video communication and remote work for the past 25 years, this last few months of trajectory in late February through April has even surprised me how fast this was going to progress. Even in the mid-’90s when I started, we had colleagues say that video communication, as you pointed out, was the ever-receding bonanza. Next year was going to be the year of video communication. Because I think there was all this hope and need. And the customers and organizations that really needed it back then were willing to put up with all of the stilted video and the expense and the extra hassle of setting it up. And so then kind of fast-forward over the past five years, there’s just been this massive improvement in technology. And it’s not just one thing; it’s a combination, and it’s the availability of almost unlimited computational power in the public-cloud services, like AWS. Almost unlimited bandwidth.

Fuller: Right.

Malloy: And so that takes a lot of the pressure off of the process of actually encoding the video or making the video so you can send it over the internet.

Fuller: Right.

Malloy: And not to mention the computational power and application development on websites and mobile devices. So all this technology was coming together over the past few years. And I would have conversations with friends over the past few years, and they would say something about what they’re using for ... they would be complaining about their video-conferencing service at work. I was like, “Well, you know it’s a lot better. It doesn’t have to be terrible anymore.” But I think there was this real skepticism about whether video communication would really work. And then all of a sudden, over the space of about a month in March, everybody was forced to go home and started adopting these tools en masse. And it’s been a really interesting sociological, leadership, company-culture experiment. Can you really do this? Because we all know about these kinds of virtual companies, companies that didn’t have any offices, they never had any offices. Most of them were kind of early-stage tech companies, maybe a little quirky. They didn’t have an office. And even me, who’s been running technology companies for 20-plus years, kind of looked cross-eyed at them a little bit. It’s like, “No, that doesn’t really work.”

Fuller: “I don’t think that works.”

Malloy: Yeah. And then all of a sudden everybody’s doing it. It’s like, “Hmm. I guess this is okay.” And even within Lifesize, two weeks before we all went home in mid-March, we merged with another company in Austin in the cloud contact-center space to expand our product line. So not only have we been trying to run our own business here at Lifesize, but as the CEO and our executive team, we’ve been integrating two companies into one over video, without having any office interaction at all. And that’s actually gone better than I would have anticipated that could ever have done it. So we’re finding out all kinds of new things.

Fuller: Craig, when I talk to executives about how they’re conceiving powering up their companies, beginning to get back into a normal workflow, they’re all universally saying they’re going to have to fundamentally revisit their processes. First, because when that power-up starts happening, there will still be pretty heavy-duty social-distancing requirements. But even beyond that, that they’re going to want to revisit how they structure work and jobs, how much business travel they do, to account for what will probably be a lingering set of restrictions, but also just as a reflection of what they’ve learned through this process. And maybe they don’t need to have monthly meetings, with everyone getting together, or so much business travel or whatever else. As they start that process of thinking how to put the type of video-conferencing technology you offer at Lifesize to work more productively and what are the factors they should take into account, what kind of suggestions would you give them?

Malloy: Well, I think it’s going to be interesting to see what happens when people go back to the office. I guess three points I’d like to make on this. I think we’re going to see, as people move back to the office, there may be a new permanently high plateau of work from home. I don’t think it’s going to go back to the way it was, at least for a long time, maybe never. So I think even companies that were almost entirely office-based with zero work from home, I think, are going to have a much higher mix of work from home. And I think they’re going to take a look at how much office space they actually do need. And so I think that’ll be interesting to see what that is. It’s not going to go back to 100 percent the way it was. Is it going to be 50 percent usage of office spaces, and now 50 percent work from home? I don’t know. But I think there’s going to be a new plateau, or a new level, of work from home, because we’ve proven that, in a lot of cases, it works. The second thing is, I think, once companies have gotten past this kind of crisis management and stabilizing their business and getting themselves back on a reasonably firm footing, I think there’s going to be a lot of business-continuity planning for what happens. Because a lot of companies were caught flat-footed, like, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got 1,000 knowledge workers, but I only equipped 50 of them—my permanent work-from-homes or just the people who travel a lot—with video communications. And now everybody’s working from home, and I need to equip everybody to be able to do that in terms of licenses.” And then a bit of a disturbing trend that we saw was on the contact-center side of our business that we’ve just added to our portfolio. The vast majority of the world’s contact centers, used for customer support and customer success and inside sales, are on-premise space—meaning it’s in the company data center. So the agent, the employee, needs to be in the office at their desk, because that capability doesn’t travel with them in many cases. And so I think there’s going to be an acceleration of the technology of communication—from technology that’s tied to the company site to something that travels with the employee to wherever they are, not just for video, but also for voice lines, for phone systems. That your phone system should just transfer to your mobile phone. Or if you’re a contact-center agent or an inside salesperson, you should be able to do that job from anywhere, not being tied to the desk. So I think companies are going to get ready for the second wave or the next thing that comes along in terms of business continuity. So I think those are a couple of major areas that people are going to think about.

Fuller: Sounds like you think that it’s going to become much more integral to processes up and down the organization, maybe more-routine processes and processes that are allowing lower-wage workers to work remotely.

Malloy: Absolutely. If it doesn’t … I don’t think every knowledge worker or service employee is going to forever work from home, but they’re going to be ready to work from home. And I think that’s some of the hard discussions and work for executive teams and IT departments of, “How do we, from a business-continuity standpoint, if we have another one of these crises or part two of this one, how can we seamlessly move home without the mad scramble and panic that accompanied this one?”

Fuller: Are there technologies or capabilities that remain to be either developed or widely deployed that you think would take video conferencing and this remote-work paradigm to a still higher level?

Malloy: Certainly, you can always increase the quality levels. As you’re asking, I’m thinking, it’s probably more about integrations into workflows. That’s one of the next progressions of this industry is, how are your communications tied into your specific work as a marketing person or as a development engineer or as a salesperson? So you’re not context-switching between applications all day, but the ability to have a video conversation or a voice conversation with your colleague, with your boss, with your customer, with your vendor can happen seamlessly within just the stream of consciousness or the flow that you’re in when you’re doing your daily work. And I think that web-based applications and cloud-based applications, the architectures are particularly appropriate for them. I think we’re going to see a lot more of that going forward.

Fuller: Well, Craig Malloy of Lifesize, thanks for joining us for this Covid-19 dispatch from the Managing the Future of Work podcast.

Malloy: Thank you. I enjoyed the conversation.

Fuller: Thank you for listening to this special episode of the Managing the Future of Work podcast. To find out more about our project on the future of work and for more information on the coronavirus’s impact, visit our website at hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work and sign up for our newsletter.