Groupware in the coronavirus age

In an interview last week with Newsday's Sean Douglas, Gabriel Faria, CEO of the TT Chamber of Commerce, responded to a question about software to enable remote work by saying, "Not yet. We are not at that stage of thinking."

He was referring to the potential impact of covid19, the fast moving, terrifyingly aggressive form of coronavirus that's essentially shut down manufacturing in China and led to lockdowns in major infected areas.

By the start of this week, covid19 had racked up over 100,000 cases leading to over 3,000 deaths around the world. Because the virus spreads most efficiently in close-range encounters between people, workplaces have been the first and hardest hit in efforts to limit the spread of the disease.

In ground zero for the disease, Wuhan in China, infection has spread most aggressively in families. Once it gets into a home, it will infect everyone unless unusually strict measures are followed. Businesses are suspending travel, deploying more hand sanitisers and switching job interviews to teleconferences.

But Faria's comment might also have applied to the workplace generally in TT, which has stoutly resisted the notion of remote work even in the face of debilitating traffic jams which routinely take an incalculable toll on the capacity of its workforce. Instead, this country has tended to embrace a colonial-era infatuation with keeping an eye on the workers.

Almost anyone who sits in a cubicle tapping away at a keyboard is probably well suited for consideration for remote work, and the software to enable productive dislocation from the workplace has been available for decades.

It now has a collective name, groupware, and it's available from a range of vendors, from small, business-sector-focused web start-ups, to massive suites of software from which businesses can cherrypick the services they need.

Microsoft TT representative Darren Mohammed was quick to respond to Newsday's story by noting the capabilities his company had on offer for remote work and citing the success of Microsoft China's transition to remote operations. According to Mohammed, 60 per cent of large businesses in TT are already using Microsoft's cloud services and it is, understandably keen, to sign up other companies interested in using its tools, which are also available for timed rentals.

Other alternatives include the somewhat technical Slack, the web app Trello and Microsoft's free versions of Teams, a new groupware product.

We've come some distance from Lotus Notes in the 1990s, but separating personality from productivity remains a challenge in the modern workplace. Despite paying lip service to diversification, all our systems are designed to enshrine face-to-face meetings and service the big economy, not the far nimbler gig economy.

It may not even be necessary to use dedicated groupware to enable remote work. What most companies need is a mutually agreed-on measure of what a successful day's work looks like from the company's perspective, a communications tool that everyone agrees on and a healthy serving of trust and confidence.

For many small businesses, including a small premium taxi fleet I travelled with a couple of months ago, it's as simple as a WhatsApp group dedicated to updates on availability, location and problem reporting.

The problem has never really been software. It's always been an approach to work that counts behinds on seats in view as more important than results recorded.

Until that changes, thousands of hours will continue to be lost to often-needless travel every day and our economy will continue to be vulnerable to something as simple as a sinkhole on the highway, far less a nationwide quarantine.

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there.