Zoom CIO Offers Inside Look at Future of the Virtual Office

BCW members and guests got an inside look at the Zoom phenomenon at this week’s People United Bank Speaker Series featuring Zoom Video Communications CIO Harry Moseley.

Moseley described how the pandemic enabled Zoom to double its workforce from 2,500 employees in January 2020 to 5,700 employees by July of 2021. He also discussed: how the pandemic’s lockdowns forced executives worldwide to quickly learn how to successfully manage staff remotely; Zoom’s innovations; and the future of work.

Moseley, who has worked at Zoom since 2018, noted how executives’ embrace of the virtual office foreshadows significant changes throughout the corporate world. “Enterprises around the world are rethinking ‘what is the purpose of the office?’ Many enterprises have come to the conclusion that the purpose of the office is where people come together, to work together, to ideate, to create, to brainstorm to do things they need to do together,” he said. “We kind of think of work as an office. It’s not. Work is actually something we do. We can actually work from anywhere.”

Moseley’s professional experiences includes information management positions at The Blackstone Group, Credit Suisse First Boston and KPMG LLP. A resident of Scarsdale, Moseley is a senior technology executive with strong financial industry experience covering application development and infrastructure across all products and platforms globally.

The shift to remote work does not mean that the corporate office is dead. Instead, the corporate office will become hybrid. Moseley said Zoom—founded in 2011—anticipated the advent of a hybrid office by innovating its service to include features that use artificial intelligence. One such feature takes people in a conference room and streams them out as individual tiles so that remote and in-office meeting participants are on an equal platform.

Moseley cited statistics by the Future Forum—a company that helps leaders drive transformation at work. Future Forum recently surveyed 10,000 knowledge workers. The survey’s top-level finding was that there is “a massive and growing divide in how executives and employees envision the future of work.”

Among the survey’s findings was that more than half the workers said that they would look for a new job in the next 12 months. During those new job searches, three-quarters of the knowledge workers said that they would seek flexibility about where they work, and 93 percent said they want flexibility about when they work. “I believe it’s going to be leading virtual, augmented with video, as opposed to leading in person and augmented with video,” said Moseley. “We’re going to the era of flexibility.”