Ricardo gives us his thoughts on the changes which he has seen professional companies take to service their clients in person through a virtual diagram.
These go in two lines. The first one is the psychological and social aspects of learning and conducting business without having face-to-face interaction with clients or associates.
That means a mental adjustment because many signs and non-verbal messages to judge a situation was lost, allowing them to adjust the message. In the same way, effective communication that establishes a trusted trust pattern with the user or client is vital.
Earning clients’ trust is a complete challenge, depending on how you present yourself physically and the environment you have built. For example, how your office looks or what type of image it’s projecting? Now we are at the extreme of not having those non-verbal means to project confidence.
Another aspect is time management. Many of the guides that we habitually follow to structure our time have changed. Lack of these guides, like the entry and exit of people from an office, collides with our time use structure. And again, it is challenging to distribute the time in an interview or presentation.
There’s an authority projection issue. It’s no easy to change an organization’s executive model or direction when the subordinates or associates are not physically present. Only those companies that delegate authority effectively learn how to perform this paradigm. For this, it’s also a requirement of an effective performance metric beyond mere physical presence within the workspace.
From my point of view, the most significant loss has consisted of the disappearance of informal communication. Having lost opportunities to chat casually with people which we are not interacting in a specific project and that, through this informal communication, you can communicate messages important for an organization’s cohesion.
Every typical behavior in offices with a waiting room with a receptionist who greets us and offers us a coffee while we wait, take a seat, and long etcetera is lost. Now the experience is much more direct and straightforward.
How do they make a good impression? How do we know if the client liked you? How do we know if the client was upset over something like the video being blurry or with bad lighting?
