The fun has just begun…

Lingo bingo has been around 25 years, I first played it when I was going through a painful strategic review with Bain back in the 1990s. Those – other than Bain, in the meeting room (remember them?) would be distributed photo-copied bingo cards with the management consultant’s jargon – we even had passwords to disguise cries of “house”.

Today’s version is played out in “isolation” but relies on our same anarchic instinct for impact. The capacity to get things wrong with mute and video buttons delights our sense of fun. The new breed of conference facilities all have “record” facilities and it is only a matter of time when someone suffers a wardrobe malfunction while in their jim jams while being videod.

I don’t think that the GDPR people ever quite got to grips with this stuff, just what do you do with an accidentally recorded video-conference?

Playful fun on corporate hardware.

This sophisticated kit is falling into our hands at precisely a time when those hands are idle.

I was watching BBC news last night and see a plague doctor crash a #COVID19 report

LMAOO PLAGUE DOCTOR ROAMING ABOUT #bbcnews #coronavirus #CoronaCrisis pic.twitter.com/fA5UG24DHT

— lil scented candle (@underlevels) March 20, 2020

The deliberate sabotage of the most serious stuff is why we have conduct risk policies and why staff love to break them.

I look forward to tales of deliberate misbehaviour where playful employees make “full disclosure” in intimate ways.

Zoom, hang-outs and Skype for business are all at Siri’s beck and call, tempting the mischievous staff members to off-site hi-jinks.

The trouble is that we really don’t understand terms like privacy and decency in this context. The conduct risk manual has yet to catch up and what looms is another 3-6 months of home-working.

The incidence of ludeness and rudeness on the web will of course become a key HR metric and I look forward to earnest conferences when pixillated videos are run for the prurient delight of HR leaders. “What the butler saw” is alive and well – and a key past-time of the IT department.

Conduct risk – which is greatly to be frowned upon – is of course key to corporate culture. Without it , there would be very little to gossip about.

While I do not condone any of this hanky-panky,  I suspect it will keep a lot of people going over the next six months. Try putting that in your conduct risk framework.