A couple days ago I spoke to a solutions consultant who advises some of the biggest companies in North America on their communications technology.

He invited me to a meeting on MS Teams –a fine collaboration suite for internal collaboration and small internal meetings. Actually I’ve literally had more Teams meetings since leaving Zoom two weeks ago than I did in the last 3 years previous.

And…they’ve not been great.

I asked why he sent me a Teams link instead of a Zoom link. They “use Teams” he explained.

“You don’t find issues with connection and engagement compared to Zoom” I asked?

“No, it’s great” he said, “I’m in client meetings all day everyday, and it’s great” he said through imperfect audio and jittery video.

No joke, this was literally within 2 minutes of him telling me he was going to turn off his camera to “save bandwidth” (a common refrain I hear from Teams users).

HONESTLY people, CEOs are out here chomping at the bit to get you back into the office so they can have proper engagement and culture (things we all want!), and many of their IT advisors are working against you! Working against them even!

Why are the people in the company who are least likely to put on their cameras, not really known for their outgoing personalities, and who have no disposable budget the ones calling the shots on communications technology?

“That’s like putting your financial controller in charge of throwing the annual company kickoff! I mean, you can do it, but you’re not going to get the results you really want.”