People on Zoom have feelings, too
It’s hardly breaking news that the COVID-19 pandemic has wrought a huge change in our working habits. Multiple lockdowns saw huge numbers of people forced to work from home, and that has, as we know, huge benefits — saving time and money on commuting, seeing more of our families, increased focus time. Our own Chris Hammond recently wrote a post with his own thoughts and feelings about working remotely: https://medium.com/william-joseph/why-i-feel-closer-to-people-now-were-not-in-an-office-together-dd3481ee60a6
We also know there are some big disadvantages to remote working: loneliness, boundaries blurring between work and home life, no suitable workspace. Research by the Royal Society for Public Health on the impact of working from home includes stats around worsening mental health, reduced physical activity, and an increased sense of isolation: https://www.rsph.org.uk/about-us/news/survey-reveals-the-mental-and-physical-health-impacts-of-home-working-during-covid-19.html
Video calls can’t replace face to face interaction
One of the curious human behaviours that I’ve noticed to come out of the increase in remote working is a tendency to forget that the people you’re working with are human beings — complex, flawed, biased. When you think about all the various quirks, idiosyncrasies and habits of humans, it’s amazing that any of us can get along at all!
When tensions run high at work, we all have to work hard to make sure that we remain professional, courteous and kind. But if we’re face to face with the person we’re frustrated with, we’ve been socialised by and large to still treat that person with common courtesy. If you had a disagreement with someone in a meeting in the office, you wouldn’t bang the door in their faces — you’d probably part ways politely and if you bumped into each other again in the loos, or making coffee, or waiting for the bus, you’d probably make small talk with them about their weekend plans or the weather. You’d see and interact with the human being that they are, even if you think their feedback on your project was unfair, or you were annoyed that they’d landed you with a load of extra work.
But if you’re on a Zoom call, you don’t get that same decompression time, that human interaction. You press the red button to leave the call, feeling annoyed and then staying annoyed with that person. You build it up in your head as you check your emails, reply to a Slack message, or even jump straight onto your next call — and you bring that resentment with you. You don’t have any of that insight into that person’s reality: the fact that their child is unwell, or they have a headache, or that they’ve been up and working since 7am because they’re on a deadline.
And so, the next time you talk to that person, whether it’s on another online call or via email or Slack or Teams or whatever other comms tool you’re using, you remember that annoyance. Suddenly they’re just a digital presence, a face on your computer screen with no emotion, no backstory, no human features. You gradually lose your empathy for them.
Dehumanisation of our colleagues
“Dehumanization is a process whereby humans treat other humans without common dignity, civility, or any other traits which hint at a recognition of those persons as equally human on a fundamental level; dehumanization strips people of their human status and renders them objects or animals, thereby absolving the dehumanizing party of the responsibility of living up to their moral and ethical responsibilities.” (https://medium.com/moments-of-passion/dehumanization-in-the-internet-world-8843dd8eb121)
The above quote might seem a bit strong for workplace passive aggression, but the second part of it is so interesting: “absolving the dehumanizing party of the responsibility of living up to their moral and ethical responsibilities”. When someone only lives online to you, they are not a real person and therefore you don’t have to treat them with the care and consideration you might naturally extend to your “IRL” colleagues.
We’ve seen this of course a lot on social media — online trolls sending horrendous messages of abuse to people they’ve never met. Famous people from Caroline Flack to Meghan Markle to Graham Norton all seem to be fair game for abuse from complete strangers online, but I’m willing to bet that these online trolls would never say any of that to to a person in the flesh.
As Taylor Swift says,
“Say it in the street, that’s a knock-out
But you say it in a tweet, that’s a cop-out”
What we do to increase face time
At WJ, we enjoy spending time together as a team and it’s definitely a drawback of working fully remotely that we get less face to face time together. But there are things we do to help increase that precious time:
- We recently spent two days together on our first ever “retreat”. We spent some time in workshops, facilitated by the excellent Tess from Collaborative Future, but the priority for us all was to spend time together as humans. We all really benefited from this connection. You can find out more about our time together here: https://twitter.com/wjdesign/status/1575790305370312704
- We have a 15 minute morning catch up every day — the whole team joins, and we chat about anything we like — that might be work related but it’s usually about bees, wild swimming, or TV shows we’re all hooked on.
- We share non-work related stuff in a specific Slack channel — podcast recommendations, hot takes on the latest TV show (though somehow we’re all 3 years behind on The Capture) and gig reviews are generally the main topics.
- Self-organised smaller coffee breaks with teammates — I love to have chats with various colleagues smattered throughout the week where we chat about anything, just like you would in the office. It might be a thorny work issue, or (more usually) it’s a general chat about the weekend, the weather, or the state of the world. It gives me energy and reminds me that there are other people working towards shared goals with me.
One of the great things about working in an office together is the human interaction you have as you pass someone’s desk, or eat lunch together. We’ve lost so much of that as we work remotely, and we need to actively work to make sure we don’t become remote in every sense of the word.
