Nothing Beats Meeting People Face to Face

Yesterday I spent the day at The Business Networking Show (well recommended btw). It’s an annual event that’s run for the last 4 years, and just gets better and better every time. Although we built the App for the show, this year I decided not to exhibit and have a stand there, as I wanted to just enjoy watching the speakers and catching up with people.

It’s probably the one time in the whole year that I get to see people I know from all over the country. I keep in touch with most of this people all year round on social media, but we rarely get to meet face to face.

Yesterday reminded me that no matter how good, and how well you use social media, you still can’t beat meeting people face to face. As people, I believe that we’re designed to spend physical time together. So many things get missed in conversations online that are there in person. There are the obvious things like tone of voice, body language etc, but there’s also some kind of X factor that never translates to online. No matter how good a video call is that addresses some of these things, you still can’t replicate actually being with someone.

As some of you may know, at my company Appware, we all work remotely so this may sound like a strange thing to say. During the week we all use various tools to communicate and speak to each other. Tools like Skype for video calls/screensharing, and Slack for most project communication. This does work really well on a day to day basis. However, we do still all get together for a couple of hours a week, for our face to face company meeting. We’ve found that this combination of keeping some face to face time, and then the majority of communication being online works really well.

No matter how good technology becomes, I still believe that we’ll always need to spend face to face time together. It’s just how we’re wired.

Thanks

Richard