Why you need to stop meeting in-person now for doing business!

Work 3.0 is here and competing with you!

From the desk of Sylvia Ernst, Ph.D – Sr. Director Community Growth at CDD

Just recently LinkedIn featured this article: http://www.inc.com/rene-siegel/five-reasons-you-need-to-meet-in-person.html and it got raving comments. But let’s think this through for a moment.  I would counter that in person meetings – and a corporate culture and mindset which favors in-person meetings - could endanger your company’s success and even existence. And that is why you need to change.

How so? Companies which prefer in-person meetings will increasingly compete with the ones which work “virtual” or have some sort of “Work 3.0” model implemented.  The more agile, virtual organization can act much faster and more economically throughout the world: http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/04/work-3-0-how-the-employment-model-needs-to-change/  and this Gartner study toots the same horn: http://www.wired.com/cloudline/2012/03/personal-cloud-2014/

It made me think about our industry which is pretty hands on; folks being in the lab and sitting together at team meetings to look over results together.  Can you apply work 3.0 to drug discovery processes and workflows? How can you work with various biology labs, with numerous assay results and all the tweaking which is done in team meetings in real time? How do you work with chemistry labs, their compound management and iterative synthesis processes - when you are not there?

Let me say – there are an increasing number of companies, large and small which are way ahead with virtualizing most of their business workflows. We will feature these leaders in CDD Spotlights, stay tuned. Several are using CDD because they already virtualized their business processes (i.e. made them more collaborative).

Can you afford not to consider Work 3.0?

Here are 4 important things you can do to get started. If you want to read on please download the 2 page white paper which describes the 4 steps to take.

1. Stop meeting in person now and virtualize operations and culture.
2. Analyze your businesses processes and virtualize everything you can.  Some things still need to be done in person and are “hands-on”, other tasks you outsource.
3. You need to review your tools and technology and make everything “virtualization ready”.
4. Change how employees are compensated to be independent of clocking in.