One of the many fun facets of my job as a Voalte clinical trainer is travel. Lots and lots of travel. Crosstown and cross-country. Short-term (I've spent less than 24 hours onsite before flying out again) and long-term (after a month in Houston, I had fallen in love with "The Big Heart," a nickname the city earned post-Katrina). When I'm not introducing new users to Voalte One, I'm kayaking outside the La Jolla sea caves, eating whole lobster in the North End (yep, wore the bib!), and watching sunkissed city kids dancing at the waterwall at Millenium Park…
On a recent long flight sans Wi-Fi and entertainment, I had time to do some thinking and I found myself in awe of how drastically working for Voalte has changed the way I perceive and experience our world. Specifically, I'm now acutely aware of our connectedness…all the different ways we choose to communicate, conduct business, and foster relationships.
Voalte is indisputably the industry leader in smartphone healthcare communications, but somewhere over New Mexico I considered that we're also still very much at the forefront of a broader movement towards more efficient interactions conveyed via increasingly sophisticated technologies. We're among the communication cowboys (and girls)! How fitting that I was thinking of this 29,000 feet over Santa Fe.
Of course, there are valid arguments against this evolution, trend, whatever you want to call it. People are concerned that we're swiftly losing the value of personal interaction and face time (the literal meaning, not the Jobs creation), and there might be something to that. Instead of exchanging a handshake when I accepted employment with Voalte, I signed and scanned a document. I emailed my enthusiasm to an office 1,248 miles away. So I get it. I empathize with a fear of the implications that pulling back from human-to-human connections might have on us. But while I waited for the flight attendant to reach my row with the beverage service, I put together an entirely different, more positive spin on technology-assisted communication.
The bottom line for me is this. All of that impersonal communication technology facilitated me finding and gaining employment with Voalte, and now when I return from my travels, I come back to smiles, and hugs, and long "catching up" conversations with coworkers that have quickly become friends. Technology isn't impersonalizing communication; it's expanding our world and allowing us access to people, places, and activities that weren't possible before. So I'm proud that we're connectivity pioneers. I'll keep viewing the world with excitement for the future, open to all the possibilities that new communication methods will bring. I've witnessed firsthand in hospitals all over the country what we have accomplished in healthcare; I can't wait to see what other industries will introduce…