How work has evolved since the dawn of Zoom

When executive coach at TLS Leaders, Loren Margolis, invited a client to a Zoom meeting in 2018, they asked why she wanted to go to a Zumba class.

Nowadays, it may be hard to imagine anyone mistaking “Zoom” for “Zumba”—almost as hard as it may be to fathom any workplace operating without help from one of the most widely-used video conferencing platforms in the world.

Zoom (then called Saasbee) was founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan, a former engineer at Cisco’s Webex, with the mission to bring “human connection” to the virtual workspace, all while helping companies cut the time and cost associated with having employees travel to meet with clients and coworkers in other cities, Aparna Bawa, Zoom’s COO, told HR Brew.

With $9 million in funding from investors including Webex founder Subrah Iyar, Yuan and his team of 40 engineers spent two years developing the platform before releasing it to the public in 2013. By September 2013, Zoom had garnered 3 million “meeting participants” and 4,500 enterprise customers, and by 2017, it had raised $100 million in funding at a $1 billion valuation. The company went public in April 2019 at a $15.9 billion valuation.

One year later, the Covid-19 pandemic would create the conditions for Zoom’s business to skyrocket—in just one day in April 2020 the platform saw 300 million meeting participants, reported 470,000 enterprise customers for the same year, and a $72.4 billion valuation. Its influence followed. The company is currently valued at $22.4 billion at the time of publication.

The before times. Virtual meetings in the early 2000s were “awful,” Carina Cortez, chief people officer at software company Cornerstone, told HR Brew.

There was often static in the audio and a lag in the video. And employees, Cortez recalled, would complain, “I don’t like seeing myself on the screen,” and worry if their “hair looks okay.” But the “initial weirdness” soon subsided, and as the technology improved and companies expanded their global workforces, she said videoconferencing became a normal way to conduct business.

“Even before the pandemic, it was this idea that video was becoming very normal,” said Bawa, who joined Zoom in 2018 as its chief legal officer. “Before Zoom, we had the conference call…[but Zoom] just made it much more personal. You can see my face. You can see my expression, you know how I’m feeling…It’s a much more personal connection.”

That’s why Margolis, who's also leadership faculty at Stony Brook University, chose Zoom over other videoconferencing platforms of the early 2010s, including Skype and Webex. Margolis said Zoom was easy to use, and she could still make a human connection with clients, which was crucial as she was starting her coaching business, TLS Leaders, in 2015.

“As someone who has to work so closely with the people element in working with leaders on how to use empathy, how to lead better, how to engage their employees better, you have to have something where you could almost reach across the screen, like you’re almost there in person,” Margolis said.

During the pandemic. Zoom experienced a seemingly overnight surge in popularity in March 2020, when the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic. One day, employees were in the office five days a week, and the next, millions were home, trying to figure out how to virtually connect without much, if any, experience.

At the time, Cortez was Glassdoor’s chief people officer, and while she said she was “fortunate” that she and her workforce could work from home, there were hurdles. Some of her employees, especially those early in their careers, didn’t have a quiet space to work remotely. In addition to providing employees with noise-canceling headphones, she said Glassdoor issued company-branded Zoom backgrounds, so they didn’t have to worry about what was going on in their backgrounds.

Margolis, meanwhile, said she became known as “a Zoom subject matter expert.” She went from coaching clients on leadership for the in-person workplace to the virtual one.

“A lot of organizations that I worked with, and still work with, their focus then became, could you teach our leaders [and] could you teach our employees how to use the digital body language?” Margolis said. “It was a combination of helping people use this new way of communicating and connecting with others.”

Once employees became familiar with the technology, Margolis said companies would ask her to teach their HR teams to maintain influence virtually and help managers promote inclusion—skills that didn’t inherently transfer from the in-person to virtual workplace, she said.

The lasting impact. While Zoom has helped workforces communicate and collaborate from afar, Margolis said the platform has also helped bring about an “acceptance of imperfection.” Zoom calls give employees a glimpse into the professional, and personal, lives of their colleagues, and the blurring of those lines has enabled more authenticity.

“You started to see people’s messy houses. You started to hear their babies crying in the background, or you started to hear their partner, or their spouse, or their roommate on their own videoconference call,” she said. “This emergence of imperfection, where that perfect picture of your life disappeared and people’s real lives emerged. Warts and all.”

Margolis recalled examples of this phenomenon, including one when a lawyer couldn’t figure out how to remove a cat filter from his screen during a Zoom court hearing.

While many employers have since mandated a return to the office, workers still use Zoom—the company boasts 192,600 enterprise customers. HR leaders, Margolis said, will play an integral role in setting “the rules of engagement” for how they communicate and get work done going forward.

“Here are some appropriate times to have virtual meetings. Here’s when an email suffices. Here’s when it should be in person,” Margolis said. “That’s such a great role for someone who is a leader in HR…because people need guidance in that now.”