The COVID-19 pandemic and working from home for many office workers have wrung the variety out of our lives. Many of us have found ourselves in a Groundhog Day scenario (referring to the movie) where our workdays are a nearly-identical blur:
The variety of our days is mostly gone:
Our commute (from the bedroom to the kitchen to the home-office-or-whatever) is the same: we don’t drive different routes, we don’t make any stops, we don’t experience the weather, we don’t see any scenery, and we don’t see any interesting people or things.
Our workday is more regimented: we have rigid schedules, we don’t run into people in the hall, we don’t have those impromptu, unplanned conversations, and we don’t see each other at lunch.
In short, our work lives have become quite dull – the same routine every day, with little prospect for change.
Here’s an observation from eight years of WFH, particularly since 2020 when we were sent home to work remotely for God-knows-how-long: we no longer look at each other in the eye. This may seem like a small thing, but it feels important to me: eye contact is the most intimate body language in an office conversation, vital because it keeps us honest and connected. In videoconferencing, we can look into the eyes of someone we’re talking with, but when we do so, they see us looking up (or down, if the webcam is at the bottom of our screen). Or, if we concentrate on looking into the webcam and its tiny green dot, we are not looking into the eyes of the person we are speaking with, even if they think we are. You could argue that the use of a smartphone makes this a little easier, but still: we are looking at a video representation of the person, not at the actual person. The result: we are not connected with our co-workers as we should be. The quality of our connected relationships suffers, as if we’re all holding back a little bit.
I don’t have the answers – I’m not a sociologist but a technologist. My observations are as a layperson who instinctively feels like something important is missing in our work-from-home, long-distance work relationships.
I’m going skiing today with my kids. This time of year, I relish the every-other-Friday mental health break of connecting with people and getting outside.
Peter H. Gregory 