There is no substitute for face-to-face meetings, either planned or serendipitous. We can build all the fancy real-time and asynchronous tools we want, but none of them are as effective as staring eyeball to eyeball and shaking one another's hand (the rituals may vary by culture but the message is the same).

Taken to its extreme, everyone would work in a single facility — people from every company would be in this one place, "the office." There would be one and only one office. All companies, all contractors, suppliers, distributors, salespeople ans so on would work in the same location so they could get together with whomever they needed to meet for consultation or collaboration.

The extreme case is, of course, absurd. We live (and work) around the globe. We to try to overcome differences in time and space, language and tools, skills and motivation, and other phenomena that intrude in meetings to make them less productive. Technology helps us have (somewhat) effective meetings when we're awake at different hours, working in different geographies and so forth.

Technology helps. But it's not a replacement for face-to-face meetings at the water cooler. (It can even make some face-to-face meetings work better,but that's not the focus here.)

Where has technology failed you?

When do you insist on face-to-face meetings?

Does everyone really need to be in the same office?

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Tom, please comment on the benefits of working remotely even when there is a centralized office. I am speaking specifically of working at home one day a week or so vs. at home the full work week. Have you or others done any studies on productivity, cost savings to the employee, employee retention and satisfaction, and benefits to the company. Thanks.

Hi, Tom. As CEO of one public company and chairman of another, and involved in about five more, I almost never insist on f2f meetings unless I'm about to deliver really bad news. Recently, I had to close an office at one company. That requried a f2f meeting because you don't want to do things like that over the phone. When you really need to have a "heart-to-heart" discussion with someone, etiquette and empathy require the sacrifice of travel.

But in general, what's the point. I hang out in my home-based offices in either FL or CT, talk all day on the phone (a skill I learned at Gartner), and use tools like Glance.Net or Webex, AIM, and X7Chat, Yahoo Messenger and my Creative Labs webcam.

OK - sometimes I get Cabin Fever ... but executive decisions are location independent.

Face to Face allows us to instantaneously measure the impact of our words and adjust our tone/lexicon to ensure we achieve the desired results. This is expecially useful when what we need to say could be misunderstood or taken badly.

Even in the office, I avoid email and the telephone if I need to have a conversation where I am not really sure what I am trying to say (still defining the problem or objective) or where I need someone else to agree that a change needs to be made, but I don't want them to waste time trying to avoid blame.

Having been a victim of the virtual office for almost three years now, how I fancy I could just sit across the table and communicate? There's nothing more annoying than the thought of going on about expressing your views over the phone while not knowing if the other end is still listening in or muted the phone long back and busy microwaving lunch.

Nevertheless, there's no denying the benefit that technology has brought to us by enabling us to do business from across the sea. But I am sure all of us do look forward to the one off f2f meeting which are hard to manage these days with teams spread across the globe. 'One office'...wow...sounds just too good to be true.

Tom, I think that organizations often try to substitute technology for face-to-face contact but the real issue is that they are using the wrong technology to achieve a reasonable goal. The reality is that we cannot all be face-to-face and what we hear from some of our customers is that sometimes *not* being face-to-face is a good thing!

Ultimately what we *do* want is to be able to interact with people inside and outside our organizations in an interactive ongoing dialogue. The online water-cooler so to speak. Unfortunately, email and IM are the most used electronic tools for group communication but they are horrible for conducting ongoing, interactive group discussions. They create inbox clutter, are plagued by spam, and they promote information silos because you cannot include large groups without annoying people. Voice/video calls are effective when everyone is present and available but we all know that is not always the case.

Our customers (who include seven of the top twelve banks in the world among others) find that persistent group chat is an effective substitute for a great deal of face-to-face meetings. It allows large, dispersed groups to interact like they are at a water cooler but without creating information silos or losing productivity from message overload. And, they find that text chat/conferencing that works across timezones (when people come on and off line during the “conversation”) actually breaks down cultural communication barriers because people from some cultural backgrounds who tend not speak up forcefully in a face-to-face meeting or voice call will provide deep insight into an issue when given time to reflect and carefully formulate a response.

I am not suggesting that face-to-face is a bad thing by any means. But we all know it isn’t always an option. The good news is that there are technologies out there that do a better job of substituting for it, and improving on it, than many organizations realize.

Meeting a few times per year in person and staying in daily contact via phone, IM, virtual office, etc. is better than paying tens of thousands to the airline industry. It's important to meet face to face because it reminds you of alot more about a person than you get from e-mail, IM, or phone. Is that an angry pause on the telephone, or does this person just take their time speaking? Is that exclamation mark in an IM session mean happiness or suprise? The more time you spend with a person face to face, the more meaning you will gain from other forms of communication because you can tie body language to words more.

Interesting to read the comments of all. My company does a lot of work figuring out which tools can be used in what way by not only team that need to collaborate, but also generations that need to collaborate.
We find that certain generations (particularly what's now being coined the 'Einstein generation' in the Netherlands) are perfectly capable of dealing with emotions via IT tools. For them its perfectly normal to get hired & fired by SMS or IM.

I'm not suggesting we're dinosaurs and need to change, but more recognition of different ways of using IT tools across generations and teams will go a long way to ensuring 'remote' working becomes more viable for a greater group, so we can all get back to the work-life balance we yearn for.