Last week's newsletter on the role of video in a unified communications strategy prompted a very interesting response, excerpted below:

“I concur with the observation about multitasking as a reason why people won’t turn cameras on. Starting in the late 90s, I noticed people (myself included) who started staying in cubes/offices and calling into meetings even if they were only a few steps down the hall from the conference room. Reason: Internet access. Also when we are supposed to have important person-to-person interactions we instead either stay in offices and call in to meetings, or we go to meetings and bring laptops and promptly check out of the meeting room we are in and into ‘cyberruption’ space. I observed this as the seed stage of a drop in effective technical/business productivity. The main thing we are losing is strategic level thinking, both on the technical and business elements of our workplace. People have largely stopped spending focused amounts of uninterrupted time doing a single thread of work and, as a result, have stopped ‘seeing the big picture.’

The first kind of productivity that sees a drop in quality and effectiveness is the work that involves ‘reflection’: strategy, architecture, innovation, planning, post-project review, etc. At the risk of sounding like a technology Luddite, what we need is a business culture change involving two main things. Companies must set up cultures that reward/encourage the following:

1. When people do have meetings with the intent to get team-based work accomplished, people who are in the building should attend in person without laptops, cell phones, etc.

2. If a person is remote…is expected [to] use a desktop video system, that [system should] also display a text list of the names of their active PC applications. The entries of this list should then flash prominently when that person uses them so other participants know when attention is being diverted from the discussion. People who are remote and do not use video in this manner should only be allowed to listen...not to speak.

I know this sounds draconian, but the only thing that changes behavior in an effective way is social peer pressure. If the above behaviors/requirements were instituted in companies, we would see an increase in the attractiveness of desktop video and an improvement in the quality and productivity of teams in our corporations.”

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.