Jie Shuo <br>Explanation of Communication, Code and Technology
Rongyun Chief Scientist Ren Jie
The first perspective of industry observation
A while ago, everyone was working and studying from home. My child and I are facing a screen, I have a video conference, and he has an online class. Follow [Rongyun Global Internet Communication Cloud] to learn more
I observed that in a 45-minute class, children can concentrate for up to 20 minutes. And one of my video conferences, once it's more than an hour and a half, it's hard to concentrate.
It is believed that this scene occurred in many families under the epidemic.
Regardless of whether we are adults or not, our limits are greatly reduced compared to offline activities.
This is just one of the least drastic challenges we have to overcome when we bring our offline scenarios to online. Along with saving commuting time at home and relatively free work rhythm, there are a series of problems such as employee work status management, poor online communication, etc., not to mention offline obstacles to customer access, product delivery and even some problems. The impact of the overall failure of the industry supply chain.
Therefore, aside from the heavy damage to the economy caused by this epidemic, in terms of corporate organization and business methods alone, what many industries are experiencing now will have far-reaching future impacts , and even our mainstream work and lifestyle may accelerate. Towards a new paradigm.
Today, I will chat with you about this issue, some of my thoughts during this period of time.
Work From Anywhere liberate from a fixed office location
At the beginning of the stay at home, almost all companies immediately implemented a series of measures, including morning and evening meetings, daily newspapers, and even exaggerated hourly reports, or irregular screenshot monitoring. Personally, I think it all stems from managerial panic or inertia.
Managers struggle to make sure their employees are "on the job," a feeling of powerlessness created by physical distance. Assuming that everyone has a strong self-management ability, based on the importance of the current collaboration, the problem of communication efficiency will become prominent.
Everyone always feels that video conferencing is not as efficient as face-to-face communication. Because when we communicate, more than half of the information is conveyed by gestures, expressions, body language, manners, etc. These parts are difficult to express and perceive through video conferencing. Whether facing the camera or online instant messaging, we will be more solemn and vigilant, which will indeed affect the efficiency of communication.
In this state, I prefer to communicate less , or more specifically avoid ineffective communication .
In fact, this kind of situation often happens offline, glance at who seems to be free, and pull in to have a meeting together. Maybe this topic is related to him? But in fact, sometimes it is possible without him.
Therefore, we should get used to working online, not only by means of remote communication such as video conferences, but by using tools, management procedures and norms to achieve the purpose of collaboration through less language communication.
For example, the synchronization of background information before the meeting always takes up a lot of everyone's time, which is also inefficient. We need to form a better collaboration model. Before the meeting, organize relevant background information into documents and share them, so that everyone can understand in advance according to their own time rhythm.
Therefore, from a management point of view, the inspiration brought to us by the epidemic is that we should reconstruct a standard online collaborative workflow and shorten the communication process. This way of working is still beneficial to the company's management even if it returns to the regular office.
Another trend we cannot ignore is that telecommuting is an inevitable part of social development . This has been widely reached by many technology companies in Silicon Valley, and more and more companies advocate Work From Home, or even Work From Anywhere.
In the process of transferring from the primary and secondary industries to the tertiary industry, the proportion of work that must be done offline is less and less. When your means of production are no longer hoes, bricks, buzzing machines, but computers, audio and video equipment and even a cell phone. The nature of work has changed, with an increasing emphasis on creativity .
This is also an inevitable result of the continuous development of technology. The global transfer of labor-intensive industries is driven by cost. Automation can be fully realized when the human cost of the world is higher than the cost of AI automation.
At present, AI is not very good at complex logic processing. Although it simulates the human brain, its principle is completely different from human thinking logic. Therefore, less complex and sophisticated work is left to AI to complete, while human beings are more focused on creativity, creativity and personal artistic creation that require complex logical thinking ability and have no logic or clues to be found.
Our work tends to be creative and creative, and so-called "surveillance" based on location and physical space doesn't make much sense. Employees need more opportunities to think deeply, and we should pay more attention to the output of results. Therefore, telecommuting is a visible trend.
Not only because of the absolute advantage of saving commuting time in big cities, but also because in this mode we will also gain more freedom and be more conducive to creative output. Therefore, from the perspective of the nature of work itself, distance and space are no longer obstacles. What we need to solve is the mental health problems of employees that may be caused by working from home. After all, work-based social relationships are a huge part of everyday life for most people, and we need face-to-face social interactions. Of course, that's another topic.
Communication technology, "digital nomads" and new commerce
The nature of work itself has changed, making it more suitable for telecommuting and bringing more attention to the digital nomad lifestyle.
This is a way that has been popular for a while globally in a niche area. On the basis of the global communication network, the strong relationship between work and work place is broken, and people rely on the Internet to generate income and realize the freedom of location and time .
In addition to a more comfortable working environment, its biggest attraction is geographic arbitrage. Simply put, it is to use the income and purchasing power of first-tier cities to consume in third- and fourth-tier cities and even townships and rural areas.
In the context of globalization, the boundaries of this geographic arbitrage are wider, and digital nomads are mainly concentrated in places with a good environment, such as Chiang Mai, Bangkok, and Bali, where consumption levels are relatively low. Recently, I discovered that such digital nomadic communities have also appeared in some rural areas in the south of the country. And they also expanded from more freelancers to full-time employees in the beginning.
One of the more vivid terms I think of this form is "brain nomads" , where mental workers rely on online means to search for resources and relationships, just as our ancestors searched for prey on the plains.
I think this is also a future trend. The ultimate state of human beings is a conscious body, which is independent and free, and can go anywhere to obtain more resources and information. After Facebook changed its name to Meta, All In is also similar in this direction, finding its way inward and spiritually.
Of course, this also requires a lot of support. For example, better collaboration tools and a more reasonable process, Apple also showed its efforts in collaboration at the just-concluded WWDC22.
In addition to collaboration, the demand for communication in future work forms is also stronger .
A few similar virtual office spaces have emerged recently. You can apply for an online office area with a fixed number of people on the platform and configure several conference rooms. When employees log in to the platform, they enter the office area as virtual images, appear on the corresponding workstations, and have their own IDs on the top of their heads.
You can also walk around in the space, and people near the camera can see the picture presented on your head.
When you enter a virtual conference room, people in the room can hear each other talking to each other, but people outside the room can't hear or see each other even if they're standing very close.
Of course, such products still need to be further deepened. In the future, with the in-depth development of the Metaverse, VR and AR may be combined, and the scenes will be more abundant.
Rongyun is also focusing on and investing in the optimization of communication experience in virtual space, including but not limited to range voice, range video , and another large piece - the combination of three-dimensional presentation and communication, such as actions, expressions, etc., which are strongly related to the simulated offline experience. .
From the bottom level, after entropy coding enables digital transmission of audio frequency, the core communication technology has not changed much in essence.
Clearer and more real-time are all auxiliary, and have not made a qualitative leap in online communication. What we see is still not a real 3D world, and it is very different from the final offline simulation results. It is still very early. state.
This is also the opportunity and mission given to the communication industry and practitioners by the new era , which is to serve digital residents such as Generation Z and make their digital life more convenient and interesting.
So I think in addition to voice and video, there will be more revolutionary technologies in the future, giving us a sense of space and a panoramic experience, which will be a real leap of the times.
There is no "force majeure" in business operations, there is always a PlanB
In addition to working from home, another challenge brought by the epidemic to enterprises lies in the implementation of corporate strategies and resilience.
Human society has been facing some long-standing risks, and the epidemic is one of them. It is inherently hidden in our lives, but everyone ignores it.
After the first half of 2020, the overall control and management of the epidemic situation in our country is good, so when companies formulate strategies and related plans, they ignore the huge impact of the epidemic.
However, businesses should have some backup plan in place, especially when the risk is obvious to everyone. We shouldn't really see it as force majeure to lie flat to excuse our laziness.
Just like we consider force majeure factors in the construction of IT systems - to ensure rapid data recovery and business continuity through off-site backup and other methods. The same is true for business operations. We need to do a good job of PlanB from the very beginning in terms of strategy and tactics to deal with the occurrence of such risks.
For example, when business activities cannot take place offline, how to transfer the proportion of business to online. The way employees are managed, the way customers are reached, and the process of delivering products all need to start a backup plan right away. More importantly, companies must also be keen and fast-tracked to new opportunities.
Under the epidemic, the most typical opportunity market is the online entertainment industry, as well as takeaway, collaborative office and so on.
Going overseas is also a big opportunity, because in general, the online time of users around the world is increasing. Closing down, people's original leisure time has been transferred online.
We have seen that TikTok’s data shows that its global peak monthly activity has exceeded 1.2 billion, and its daily activity has surpassed Douyin’s domestic data (600 million+). You know, at the beginning of 2020, TikTok’s daily life was less than 250 million.
The sudden emergence of Douyin and TikTok has doubled the valuation of bytes by nearly 36 times. More importantly, for the first time, Chinese content platforms have penetrated all over the world, creating a new global business model .
Another representative is SHEIN. As an e-commerce platform, in May this year, it overwhelmed popular apps such as TikTok and Instagram, and won the championship position in the US free app download list.
This was hard to imagine before. The key point is that, as the largest cross-border fast fashion company in my country, it does not conduct business in China.
Previously, on the path of Chinese companies going overseas, more mature models went overseas to seek increments after being verified locally. And SHEIN has taken the initiative to choose overseas markets from the very beginning, setting another example of Chinese companies doing global business .
Future corporate development, especially entrepreneurial projects within the Metaverse ecosystem, will naturally show weaker cultural and national barriers, and are more inclined to anchor the global market from the very beginning. For enterprises, this may mean a new impact on talent screening, methodological precipitation, and a more different corporate culture and technology concept. New ways of living and working are approaching, and there is the potential for a whole new system to grow here.
Finally, I would like to recommend a book to everyone, "The Resilience Implementation of Chaos Engineering Complex Systems", which is of great reference value for engineers to deal with complex systems and for organizations to deal with complexity.
Jie said the column team also prepared a book to give out as an interactive prize:
①Follow this official account, reply to the book and get the lucky draw applet ② Forward this article to the circle of friends before the lottery draw and do not set up groups
※ Remember to complete the above two actions for verification when redeeming the prize ※ The final interpretation right of this event belongs to Rongyun
Regarding the profound impact of the epidemic on life and work,
If you have any findings and thoughts, please share them in the comments below~
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