Workplace in the Covid world and the one thing technology struggles to replace

I’m not the world’s most social person. In terms of my ability to cope with lock down, I can probably reasonably say that I was born ready. Not because I have any prepper tenancies but simply because I can handle a lot of my own company and that when it comes to contact with others, a little goes a long way. What’s also true however is that I’ve also spent most of the last twenty years working in offices.

Due to the Covid19 travel restrictions, like a lot of people, I have for the last couple of months been working from home. Its been a bit of an evolving process with only the ability to take phone calls at first, developing to the point where I can now do most of what I could do in the office. There is an exception.

So much of what is interpersonal communication in the workplace are passing hellos and hi-ya’s with the people you bump into. You could look across the room and see which colleague wasn’t busy and exchange a few words or alternatively a conversation that started on a work topic might morp into a  few words on sport/celebrities/TV/whatever. Technology can’t replace that. No one picks up the phone to say ‘hello’ then put it down again or if they do, they get asked pretty quickly to stop. What all these have in common is their unplanned nature, which is exactly what technology can’t match. Sure you can pick up a phone in a moment but for speaking to a work colleague, I think most of us would have a feeling that phone conversations with work colleagues are for work topics, not to mention it’s impossible to tell if they’re in the middle of something. So non-work topics get treated as unimportant, frivolous and are dispensed with. People stop getting that low level of social interaction and even if they aren’t consciously aware of that lack, subconsciously they start to feel it.

It has been said many times that humans are social animals. Isolate us and sooner or later, the vast majority of us will begin to suffer on a mental level. We don’t know how long these restrictions are going to last. If Covid makes a second pass or it turns out to be the genie that can’t be stuffed back into its bottle, then working from home could become the new norm for vastly more people and we have to acknowledge that from the standpoint of mental health, that has some negative implications. I haven’t yet seen much media mention of mental health problems from lock down like depression but behind closed doors, that is likely a problem that is brewing.

So the question is what to do?

Personally I think there are two levels, staff and management. On a management level I believe it falls on on managers to check in with their immediate subordinates on at least a weekly basis and not talk shop but attempt to engage. Sure it’s going to be stilted and awkward at first but this may well be a skill people have to develop. On a staff level we may need to develop a willingness to pick up the phone to a colleague and ask ‘are you free for a chat’ and not be put off by the occasions when the answer is ‘no, I’m in the middle of something’.

Ultimately the office chat isn’t a luxury and shouldn’t be treated as such.