Sampath Sowmyanarayan, President of Global Enterprise at Verizon Business, talked about his predictions of how enterprise business might look in a post-pandemic world. Here are some of the bigger takeaways from the interview with Business Insider.

Video Conferencing as a Long-Term Solution

Thanks in part to the pandemic, many of the tools necessary for video conferencing are becoming more cost-effective even as their quality improves. Video quality is fairly good with a decent internet connection; bandwidth is cheap; and laptop camera prices continue to drop.

Although Sowmyanarayan thinks video-conferencing will continue to maintain its popularity as a remote management and collaboration tool, he also suggests some caution in leaning too heavily on it for too long.

“As with anything, fatigue could set in,” he says. “People may get to the point of switching video on and off more often. It’s difficult to do 12 hours of video and voice versus just 12 hours of voice. Even some of these immersive experiences like AR, VR, or digital avatars take a sensory toll eventually.”

Should Enterprise Organizations Use Productivity Monitoring Tools to Ensure Employees are Actually Working When They Work From Home?

“If everyone’s working on the screen with video, Big Brother is very easy to implement from a technical perspective,” says Sowmyanarayan. “But I think that Big Brother systems would be the kiss of death for remote work.”

Sowmyanarayan points out that constantly micromanaging remote work employees may lead them to return to working at the office. He suggests enterprise executives view productivity monitoring tools with a healthy amount of skepticism, keeping in mind that those tools may backfire among employees.

In the productivity monitoring sector in general, many of the tools have been met with a cool reception. For example, Zoom quickly dropped a feature they experimented with that allowed their software to track user eyeballs in video meetings to make sure participants were paying attention. It did not go over well.

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