Juha-Matti Arola’s blog

I was spending recently my holiday, but it was not preventing me to participate into workshops arranged by opinlakeus.fi consortium based in Seinäjoki, Finland located about 400 kilometers north of Helsinki. It is an unique secondary school eLearning network in Finland covering all the high schools, polytechnic and adult training organizations operational within that area. It was very positive to see that the ideas I have experienced seem to realize there. Work based on virtual meetings should be useful if you do not want to drive one way 130 kilometers on the dark and icy roads.

I expressed my vision that 60 % of travelling related to project work could be decreased due to virtual meetings and with the same team you can run two projects in a year instead of one project meaning 100 % growth in efficiency. We are talking about a big paradigm shift here, which will change the world permanently.

The challenge is not any more the technology, but the human behaviour itself. We are used to drive and fly. We are used to receive our compensation like daily allowances or hotel/airline bonuses. But can we afford anymore such compensations for nothing? The employee is not at his/her best when returning from a long business trip after spending his/her time hours and hours in busy airports and very tight economy class airplane seats. It is often better to have a virtual meetings instead and complete about 3-4 business trips a day using virtual meetings.

We have used to sit in a conference room with others watching someone speaking and displaying Powerpoint slides. You might come up with ideas around 20 % of the content and after the conference you only remember 2 % (one tenth of the actual content) and you have not even tried to implement your ideas into practise to change the world. Why not to produce recordings of the presentations and then use your conference time together with others in interactive workshops in which you produce something for your work or you solve your own problems. Has anyone the courage to free us from the slavery of Powerpoint slides?

I attended Wednesday a discussion for boosting the work effiency at TKK Dipoli. This was in conjunction with a Finnish government programme initiative.

In this meeting it was clearly seen that when using virtual tools like virtual meetings or rooms we could achieve huge benefits: less worktime consumed, less costs (due to travelling, worktime etc.) and reduced throughput time within a process. This should be an important issue for country like Finland with long distances and scarcely populated areas.

When people are trained to use those tools and their activity is supported effectively, we could finally enter into a true distance work environment including virtual collaboration without the limit of place. This could mean that an employee could have a right to select his/her living location, which solves the problem of packing all people into cities. I would rather think that a person within his/her most favoured environment is the most productive. Being right next to a beautiful Finnish lake in summer or next to a skiing resort in winter is a much more innovative environment rather than sitting years and years at the same office with the same people.

This world-changing paradigm which builds up a networked collaborative environment out of the hierarchical, controlled working environment is a huge change. Virtuality might cause challenges for travel agencies, publishing houses and other controlled and supervised organizational structures in the society.