When you are in middle of an important meeting and the lights suddenly go off, your reaction can be positive at first.
When it happened to me a few a months ago, I showed surprise and laughed like everyone else.
Then, as the minutes go by, we started to think that maybe the light went out for a serious reason, which could mean having to put off the meeting or look for another place to finish it.
In both cases, it meant that most of us won’t be able to make it to the airport in time.
Another day here would disrupt our fixed plans.
So we decided to postpone the meeting and hold it through video conferencing, at least for those who had a very full agenda.
The experience turned out to be better than we thought.
Video conferencing hadn’t been our first choice; we didn’t believe it could ever replace a meeting face to face.
In fact, the meeting went so well that we decided to hold most meetings through video conferencing.
From now on, we would only meet twice a year to fix and discuss the business strategy.
Since then, things have been going smoothly and thanks to this new way of working we don’t waste time chatting but go down to business straight away, we save a lot money to the company in hotels and transport and we can enjoy more time with our families.
The downside is that maybe we are losing that friendship we had and all the things we could tell each other informally.