Is the post-corona future strictly virtual?
Even though we had silently hoped to have left the pandemic behind us a while ago, reality seems to be constantly disagreeing with us. In the beginning of the pandemic the choice was clear, we stayed at home and did anything we could do digitally. After two years of pandemic this has shifted somewhat. We have more experience with the pandemic and vaccines are widely available. So now — while “trying to go back to normal” if that even is a possibility — we more and more seem to be trying to make a choice to host our events and meetings physically, or at least phygitally — which has become an actual word by now. Very often we even start out planning an event physically and end up having to scale back down to digital after all… But should we be trying that hard to go back to a normal that might not exist anymore?
If we learned one thing during the pandemic, that is definitely that both digital and physical have upsides and downsides. What better than finding a balance between those two in order to reap the benefits of both?
- Digital reaches more and different people
When we started our digital programs at Orange Grove we were very pleasantly surprised by the number of people we were able to reach in very distant areas of Greece, or even abroad. Startups don’t always work together in one office space, they often aren’t even in the same county. It was much easier now to reach teams that are spread all over, or who are not in Athens to begin with. That is especially true when it comes to our agro teams. Basically they are almost never based in Athens. With a laptop and an internet connection, and of course the willingness to invest their precious time, these teams could now follow our pre-incubation and incubation programs.
2. Digital saves time!
Especially for those of us who live in large cities like Athens, where the traffic can be heavy and commuting takes time, being able to just press the ‘join’ button, saves us literally hours every single week. How many workshops and conferences did you follow online (possibly while also doing other work at the same time) which you would have never joined if you would have to appear in person? Personally I participated to a lot of them! And I know many people who have even had parallel sessions going on, on two different laptops! Especially with conferences, you usually don’t need to follow every single speaker, so joining online saves time!
3. Digital meetings are more to the point!
Apart from the commute, digital meetings have the tendency to last less that physical ones. Somehow being online pressures people to be more to the point and to actually organize the meeting in a more structured way. If you don’t, people end up talking at the same time, or nobody talks at all and we all know what that is like during a zoom call by now: awkward! After a certain amount of online presence, you also start to lose your participants’ attention. By planning ahead and making the points you want, again you save time from what otherwise could be a very long physical meeting. Don’t take me wrong, I miss the social part of meetings too, that is something that the different platforms have not been able to solve (yet?). But be honest, you all have that colleague that takes up a lot of space in a meeting and talks too long; isn’t it wonderful that now you can work on your emails while listening?
But of course there are many upsides to physical meetings too.
- The small talk before and after
Gathering in the meeting room and chatting around while waiting for the rest to join. Or staying a bit longer after the meeting to socialize a bit. As humans we just need that! We like to know who we have sitting across from us, not only professionally, but as a human being. Even jointly walking back to the office a few blocks is lost through digital contact. Or getting a refill of coffee together at the coffee stand.
2. Picking up on the body language at meetings
We all know from experience that a large part of any meeting is not so much what is being said, as what is being picked up on through body language. Are people relaxed, are they happy, are they stressed, what is the expression on their face or the tone of their voice? When somebody is sitting in front of a screen, often at a distance, not enough light in the space, or even having a mask covering his or her face due to restrictions, this becomes quite a challenge, to say the least! And honestly, I don’t think there is a way to fix that online. Although I do believe that we have become better at it after two years of online meetings. So maybe even that is a skill humans can develop?
3. The sheer joy of a networking event
So forget about meetings and workshops, if you ask me you could keep those online for ever. But what you will never be able to reproduce online is networking events. At Orange Grove we have had lots and lots of those in the past. Basically the space was one fulltime operating network event with people walking in and out all day long. No amount of slack groups and WhatsApp chats, or any other platform for that matter, will ever be able to make up for a live and informal gathering of humans in the same physical space. Walking around that space, with a (Heineken!) beer or glass of wine and just talking to people. Being surrounded by people. The buzz in any space filled with people is just impossible to reproduce at an online meeting, where you need to mute the whole group in order to be able to follow what one of them says. The magic of meeting a person who happens to walk around in the same space and has something interesting to say! Or the tragedy of meeting somebody who is not interesting at all and trying to get away from them in a friendly manner… even though my experience is that every human begin has something interesting to teach and share with you, as long as you are actually listening to them.
Having gone through all of the above my conclusion is that we need both, even once the pandemic is over. So there comes the concept of hybrid and phygital gatherings. Don’t lose the incredible richness of going digital, but at the same time keep physical (when possible) mostly networking meetings. You can choose to do both either in conjunction with each other (for example online workshops and once in a while offline socializing meetups) or simultaneously offer the opportunity for on- and offline participation where possible. In any case it seems to me that we will need both, whether we have a preference for one over the other…
