One consistent thing I notice in all these declarations, especially in speaking with other high-level management sorts… They’ll declare “we have better conversations in the office”, to which I simply ask “do you not ever simply call someone to shoot-the-shit?”
Case in point: we had a leaver recently, my boss had had a one-on-one and came to me saying “X is leaving, some flaky reason about job security”.
My response: “They’ve got a kid in a new school, and they’ve been a bit worried about operational security here. They just wanted to work for a bigger company because there’s inherently more stability in that sort of environment. Did X not tell you this?”
Boss: “No.”
Me: “…How long did you chat to them?”
Boss: “5 min call”
Me: “I pulled X in for a chat, we were talking for 30 mins… Do you not do this with everyone? Do you ever just take people aside for a social call?”
Boss: “…”
It’s just people from a different era, they didn’t grow up socializing on MSN etc. This is all foreign and scary to them. They’ll die (in the workplace) off soon enough.
On top of this, they don’t care about best practices. They’re shit managers who were better at getting promoted than managing people.
Meetings on Zoom suck? Well, you don’t use agendas, meeting notes, etc. Your meetings always sucked, you’re just missing the dopamine hit from socializing on the way to and from the meeting.
Bad employee relations? Well, your 1:1s are really only status calls. Your relations always sucked, you’re just missing talking to Bill about your kids when you corner him at the coffee machine.
Missing team bonding? Well, your team went to happy hour to bitch about you. They always hated trust falls. You just miss hanging out with your yes-chums.
I think amongst all this is where people get lost. Nearly everyone is capable of having these conversations, not everyone recognizes all the opportunities they have to have them. For the older folks, they can’t imagine having conversations like this anywhere but the water cooler, or after a meeting is over, over a lunch they invite their coworker to, or in a closed office. Younger generations, as you mentioned, grew up socializing on the internet so opening a DM, sending a text, or otherwise chatting off topic in a digital channel are all skills they already use. One might make the argument that short videos, text on images, voice chat, streaming, emoji, and other kinds of more modern communication modalities are all extensions of the same thought. If more CEOs and people in power spent time asking their workers and reaching out to people who are capable of socializing effectively online, rather than simply blaming the modality, we’d be in a much better place today. In fact, finding the companies which do this right is likely finding the companies which will be successful in the future - virtual work brings a lot of clear and unambiguous benefits, the trick will be finding out how to offset the negatives.
I don’t understand how you do that. If you’re in person, you have many ways to get a conversation going. For example:
- Seeing something they’re wearing/carrying or that they have on their desk and commenting on that
- Overhearing a conversation and joining in
- Being physically present alone in a location conducive to socializing while giving off inviting vibes
You can also easily see if someone is available to chat or if they’re deep in their work, and get a vague idea of their general state of mind so you know if it’s a good idea to start a conversation at all, and know what to expect from it if you do.
You get none of that from video calls. You start with a completely blank slate. When you call, all you have to go on is their face looking into the camera.
A video call is also a whole ordeal. You need to set up in one location, and you’re stuck there for the entire duration of the call. It takes time to prepare your headset and webcam, make sure you have water, etc. So it’s hard to justify a call to just make some quick exchanges like your typical “good morning” and 2-3 sentences of small talk, whereas you can easily do that in person at no cost as you walk past each other in the hallway. You can also easily just have someone walk with you as you chat, so you don’t need to make any kind of preparations ahead of time.
This is all coming from someone who’s likely autistic, so maybe my experience is different from everyone else’s, but I can say for sure that I have more difficulties with socializing in a remote setup than in person.
After 10 years working in offices, the last 3 being mostly remote, I hate to say it because I am lazy and it makes no sense to commute 2hours a day to go into an overcrowded city, but being in a physical location beats remote if done right.
The problem is, it is rarely done right. Some workplaces also just happen to be filled with people I will never bond with.
I also fucking hate to have my calendar filled with meetings and useless 1:1. It is worst than it ever been. What could have been a quick chat at my desk is now a reserved 1h long meeting for which I have to prepare and stay glued at my webcam for.
I have a friend who absolutely love remote and webcams. He loves sitting still in front of the computer and making faces and everything. Well I am not like that. I like multitasking, talking to people while I work or moving around. I loved going out for dinner with the people I bonded with to talk about stuff.
Work in the office can be made to not feel like work, I experienced it in at least 1 place. Made me feel like I was hanging out with friends all day. Remote work will sort of always feel like work for me, even with the people I like it is sort of meh. Being on call is too intrusive and not being on call is too isolated. We’re sort of missing the in-between. Anyway I could go on.
I always wished I could simply teleport into the building, because the commute has always been the worsy part of the day, by far.
Some of this is accurate. but with Teams or Webex you can set your status, and courtesy is message first and wait for confirmation before a cold call. invest in a Bluetooth headset like: MS modern headset with USB link and Bluetooth, is a game changer. i can be making a coffee in the kitchen and answer a call from the PC USB wifi , or my phone BT connection.
All of these can easily be replaced in digital environments, but you’re correct that not all environments will be conducive to this. Don’t see something you can immediately comment on? You can ask nearly anyone any of the following questions and get a response:
- What do you like to do to relax after work?
- Do you have any media recommendations for me? I’m looking for new content and curious what you like
- What’s something you wished you never had to do at work?
In terms of direct replacements or stand ins, I’d suggest some of the following:
- Somewhere for people to showcase what normally might be on their desk or on their person- this could be an internal directory of coworkers which contains some info on each person such as hobbies or pictures of their life and family and hobbies. Or it might be a simple template that you fill out and share with management to encourage others to share. It could also be something you insert into your email signature. Feel free to be creative, humans like to socialize and while some may resist sharing this info, many will be excited to.
- Public channels of various sorts, especially random and general style channels for larger team or cross team collaboration are great ways to have conversations that you can ‘drop in’ on. You can also start or end meetings with open discussions about life, prompts, or ice breaker style questions to get to know your teammates and give you conversation starters.
- Sending direct messages to see who’s available and wants to talk, creating office hours for people to drop in, or simply letting people know that you’re available regularly and frequently are all ways to open the digital door to conversation.
I don’t think it always has to be a video call, and learning how to listen and invite through multiple mediums of communication is a good skill to tap into. Humans are quite varied which unfortunately means there’s no one size fits all solution here so much as there’s a million doors that you can try to open and hope that at least a few will stick with the people you work with. As an aside a contact management system or notes can also help you to keep track of what people enjoy, the names of important figures in their lives, how they like to communicate, etc.
Yeah, so the generic small talk openers. This is definitely something I personally need to work on, but until then, it’s a rather large barrier to cross for socializing.
As for your other suggestions:
- I would think most people are less willing to put effort into this than their desk decorations. What you place on your desk is for yourself to enjoy, and it gives a real window into this person’s life. A showcase as you propose is made for other people. You put things there that you think others would like to see. You’ll get very different things, and it’s harder to do, so fewer people will do it, and those who do won’t put in the same kind of effort as they would if it were for their own personal enjoyment.
- We have these on Slack. At the start of the pandemic, we had a lot of these ideas float around on how to encourage better socialization and collaboration in an online setting. Everyone was very excited for them, but they very quickly fizzled out. Random conversations still happen and I’ll hop in on those, but they’re like conversations in a large social media platform. You exchange a few messages with a group of people, then you forget about it and never speak to them again.
- That’s also something that was tried at my organization. It similarly had a lot of interest at the start, but very quickly died. It just seems that no one really enjoyed it as much as they thought they would.
I also just realized that a large part of socializing for me is just being physically present in the same space as another person and sharing an experience as much as it is talking. Sharing a cup of coffee with someone in silence at a coffee shop? Very enjoyable and relaxing. Doing the same over a zoom call? Awkward AF.
