Does anyone work with a pacer? That guy or girl who wears a headset and roams around the office. At first glance, this person appears to be having a conversation with an imaginary friend, an odd occurrence for the workplace. At second glance they are gesturing wildly, perhaps trying out for the school play? You probably work with a pacer already – that special colleague who moves around while on a call to remain productive.
At PGi, we work with a group of conferencing users to obtain key insights that inform our marketing initiatives and product development. During one of these surveys a PGi conferencing user offered up the following wisdom, “When tethered to a land line, I feel completely trapped and end up watching the clock, counting the minutes until the call will be over. If I am on a cell phone I can get up and walk around… I find that the physcial activity of walking around lets me settle down and contentrate more.” Obviously, we’ve got a pacer in our user community.
Understanding how people meet at work or outside the office is an important consideration at PGi. After all, we want to be a part of any meeting, anywhere – when conferencing users are in the office or on the road.
We also asked the same user group about mobile conferencing access. More than 75% of those surveyed dial-into a conference call using their cell phones at least once a week. This isn’t a mind-bending stat. Having a cell phone is like having a social security number – after a certain age you just need one to function. Whenever I attend a conference call on my cell, I always notice one thing: I listen harder. I listen harder because there is more background noise, because I happen upon one of those dreaded dead zones or because I’m not multi-tasking at my computer.
On second thought, maybe there is something to this pacing thing after all.
How do you stay focused during a virtual meeting or conference call??
