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.
Geezus this is so accurate my balls just got sucked up into my body cavity.
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.
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.
Yeah, a BT headset would make things easier for me for sure, but my concern is for the other party. Not a fan of inconveniencing people.
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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.
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.
These are all great points and point at something which is unfortunately a difficult barrier to cross - one of culture. Older folks aren’t used to doing these, and so many of them end up being resistant. They then realize that their social lives are lacking, and lament not being in the office if they don’t otherwise have good social connections outside of the office. It’s nice to hear that your work gave it a shot, and it sucks to hear that none of these caught on. I personally have an extremely active social life outside of work, so I’ve never enjoyed too much small talk or getting to know my coworkers on too deep of a level, but I definitely see many of my fellow coworkers and acquaintances struggling with this kind of problem. As I said before, I think you need to keep opening doors to see which ones work. Which doors work will vary from person to person, and as you likely have already noticed the people who start random conversations on slack are likely the same small group of individuals and it’s rough to try and get people who don’t normally interact to actually interact.
Hopefully something from the reply ended up being helpful to you to start thinking about the process. As an aside, here’s a short list of some questions that are a little bit more personal/substantial than small talk, but are great once you’ve established a foothold to start to get to know someone and build some trust:
- If you were going about your normal day, how many owls would you need to see before you thought something was wrong?
- What’s one thing you’ve changed your mind about over the last year and why?
- If you could share one of your memories with anyone you wanted to, & they would get to experience it just like you did, which memory would you share?
- If you had a box full of all the lost items from throughout your life, what would be the first item you look for?
- If I were to lose all memory, what is the first thing you’d tell me about us?
- Who the most intelligent or interesting person that you’ve personally known?
- What’s something you hate that you wish that you loved?
Those are some great conversation starters, and certainly lots of relevant advice. Got a few ideas of my own as well while writing up these replies. Thanks for sharing! We’ve settled on a hybrid setup now and most of the people I care to talk to are regularly in the office, so I mostly just need to get my ass out of the house. But that’s a whole other can of worms to tackle.
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.
“Our product is so bad, WE won’t even use it.”
It’s not bad though. Zoom is great. Apparently their leadership sucks, but as a product its always done what I needed it to do without issue.
What are you comparing it to? Zoom is mediocre, in my experience. I’ve honestly had a better experience just using hangouts on Slack
Zoom had higher quality video for screen sharing.
Multiple people can screen share at once over Slack, plus people not sharing can use a pencil tool to highlight specifics on the screen, as in “you need to change this setting”
Remote work is such a boon to workers, and from my perception there is not a lot of benefit of mandating in-person work.
It really feels like the push to return to in-person is primarily driven by a combination of propping up the industrial real estate industry as well as managers not trusting their employees, and perhaps some level of maliciousness towards employees.
The return on investment on operating an office space for the nominal increase in productivity really makes in-person work feel like it’s only for the managers’ egos.
The fact that the Zoom CEO is pushing for this to me does not represent a lack of faith in their product, but a strong desire to squeeze every drop of productivity out of their employees regardless on quality of life and regardless of return on investment of the cost of operating the office.
Nestled at the end of the article is the following quote, coming from survey data
But there’s also the power trip. Remarkably, a recent survey of company execs revealed that most mandated returns to the office were based on something as ironclad as “gut feeling,” and that 80 percent actually regret ever making the decision.
I think the reality is that like most policy decisions at a workplace, they are based on nothing. They simply are drawn from how the people at the top feel like an organization should be or because that’s simply how these decision makers are used to (or comfortable with) doing things.
I truly think it’s just the corporate real estate thing. Those 80% that regret return to office are CEOs that weighed the loss from real estate contracts against the blowback from forcing employees back to office, and they are saying that they feel they made the wrong decision.
I might argue this statistic also shows that 80% of CEOs underestimate the value of their employees. Not exactly a hot take in 2023, but it’s fun to put a number to it.
I dont understand this real estate thing. Cancelling contracts or having empty space is still cheaper than everyone back in the office.
More people in the office means more maintenance, more snacks, more hvac needs, etc.
Unless your or the company’s portfolio has lots of commercial real estate securites. The commercial real estate and the financial securities behind them are in a bubble and there is a fear it could pop like it was 2007 with the mortgage securities. That was the fear behind it. And many cities had mayors pushing for a return to office because the downtowns were threatened.
Most of this comes from the C-level execs being “inbred.” Meaning many C-level execs sit as board members on other companies. These guys are all trying to scratch each others’ backs.
And many cities had mayors pushing for a return to office because the downtowns were threatened.
…with affordable housing. The horror!
If you have an unutilized asset, there’s pressure to get rid of it for the cost savings.
If you sell your asset at a loss, it looks bad for you and the company. Same for paying cancelation fees.If you legitimately think that you’re going to need that space in the future, for example because you think that we’ll find an equilibrium between “everyone work from office” and where we are now, and that we’re trending towards an organic level of office need/desire higher than we’re at now, you might see selling now as the first step to needing to buy again later, likely for higher than you sold for. So you try to “mandate” the equilibrium that you expect so you’re not in a position to have to explain why you’re holding onto a dead and losing value property.
Executives spend a lot of time talking to people and having meetings. The job selects for people who thrive on and value face to face communication. Naturally, they overestimate how much that social aspect of the job is true for everyone else, so they estimate that the equilibrium will have a lot more office time than other people would.
To make it worse, the more power you have to influence that decision, the more likely you are to have a similar bias.This isn’t an excuse of course, since you can overcome that bias simply by telling teams to discuss what their ideal working arrangement would be, and then running a survey. Now you have data, and you can use it to try to scale offices to what you actually want.
We keep hearing about ‘productivity’ in this context. Let’s explore that - back in the days when people were 5 days/week in the office, supervisors and managers concentrated on attendance and punctuality. They still could but now they are focusing on being in the office. In both cases these are proxy measures- they don’t directly measure output. What is this ‘productivity’ here? Because the actual verifiable data tells the opposite story
Basically, I think it’s exactly what @Gaywallet@beehaw.org was saying: these decisions aren’t being made with any actual facts/ data as the basis. The decisions are solely based on “gut feelings” of the higher-ups. Attendance is the only way the higher-ups know how to gauge productivity, and that is going to trump any actual productivity data.
Funny thing; my company was using Zoom long before the pandemic. It was useful for organizing meetings between offices, and at the time was the only product with good enough sound quality to actually understand people connecting from low bandwidth connections.
As the pandemic was moving to “business as usual” mode, the company did a quantitative analysis of 5-day vs WFH, plus did an employee survey on 5-day vs hybrid vs WFH. Based on those results, they went to a hybrid model for a few months and then ran another quantitative analysis: end result was that WFH model was permanently adopted for all roles where it made sense, and the company started selling off properties.
Zoom’s still used because it was able to handle all these work models, but the company has its own contract with Zoom and would never touch the default agreement. If Zoom tried that at this point, they’d just lose a large customer.
Yeah yeah, let’s unite together into a union then
It’s pretty bad when your CEO disparages your product that much. It’s like if Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said they’d be switching to Google Workspace because Microsoft Teams was inefficient and difficult to use.
Absolutely scathing.
Unless he doesn’t believe zoom is intended to solve the problem of remote work.
There’s a difference in scale of making a zoom call occasionally to add flexibility and having your entire business run off zoom for its day to day. Some things you’d want to solve for in the second but not the first case: Remote learning, team building events, snack distribution.
Offloading the entire office experience to remote isn’t as easy as just using a video conferencing app.
Unless he doesn’t believe zoom is intended to solve the problem of remote work.
Remote work fucking MADE his company into what it is today. Nobody even heard of Zoom before the pandemic. They were a nothing company with a shitty product amongst many. He knows this very well, he just can’t keep his own micro-managing inner asshole down.
And yet it still won’t solve all the remote work issues. There is no silver bullet
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Isn’t this like the second time the ceo said something like that? I think he probably needs to be unseated from his position.
Zoom does legitimately suck though, but not for the reasons he thinks. Moreso from a privacy perspective.
Let him keep shit-talking Zoom until my employers switch to a better alternative!
At work Teams has been great.
Zoom is too bare-bomes.
The I hacked it together at 3am feel of the zoom interface makes me actively hate the damn thing.
Like teams feels like a communication application. Zoom feels like a hobby project.
Teams on Linux is pretty garbage though. They removed the desktop app and replaced it with a half-baked PWA which is exceptionally buggy on every browser, even Edge. I can’t believe I did so many interviews over Teams this year, thankfully none of those jobs hired me and I got another job using Google Meet which actually works lol
Lol, I am the opposite.
- Teams feels bloated and buggy.
- Zoom is fast, can handle 100+ streams with ease, and allows mods/plugins to extend as far as you want, and
- on zoom you can draw on the other person’s screen while sharing.
- On zoom, when a meeting starts I have a “incoming call sound” so I drop what I am doing and jump on the meeting. (I can’t install on my work compy though… Sigh)
Teams has not implemented those basic features.
Teams definitely feels bloated, but having used it for years at my lost job, I can’t say I ever found it buggy. The only issue I ever had with it was actually with my bluetooth headset sometimes not being recognized, but it was never clear if that was an issue with Teams, or Windows, or the headset itself.
The Outlook integration for planning and joining meetings was super handy. If there was some way to get email in Teams then I never would have had to open Outlook again. That would have been nice.
I think the features need a lot of refinement, though. Having threaded and non-threaded chats is clumsy at best. I found the threaded chats to be far inferior, and the inability to search for non-threaded chats was very limiting. Search in general was borderline useless.
Unfortunately it’s the only viable option for some of our executive team meeting. I live in a country where there are two official languages and we sometime needs to have interpreters so that those who only speak one language can participate. The Interpreter feature of Zoom, with multiple audio tracks is mostly the only reason we’re stuck with them.
Fair.
We use the sign interpreter feature in Teams and it’s really good. The live captions struggles a bit with the Aussie accent though.
But mostly it’s the SharePoint/OneDrive/Outlook/m365 integration I find useful. If I was on Linus or macOS, I suspect I would feel differently.
OneDrive on Mac is ass.
The truest test of post capitolism. Can a company make a communication product so poorly that said company couldn’t even use it to unionize?
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The Board of Directors at Zoom should be having an emergency meeting right now to fire this guy with prejudice for comments directly damaging to the brand. Wonder why that isn’t happening? Zoom shareholders should be revolting.
[meme with the sweating guy in front of two buttons]
Realistic scenario: half the workers show up in person just to log into a video conference anyway because the other half is remote.
It’s funny because it’s true.
I work in a field where the vast majority of the work done requires an on-site presence. But meetings? I log into those. Even when the physical venue is a half dozen offices from me.
So thoroughly CEO-brained he’s sabotaging his own business. He’d rather have his serfs in spitting distance than a future for his company. Truly incredible.
Have you ever micromanaged so hard that you micromanaged your way out of micromanaging?
Maybe it’s different for the upper management types, but for me I am easily 3x more productive at home in < 6 hours than I ever was at 8+ hours in the office.
There are soo many distractions in the office environment we had (cubicle farm). People chatting behind me, constant noise, people coming up to my desk throughout the day to ask me something and disrupt my entire workflow.
I work in my quiet home with headphones on listening to music. When people need something from me they ping me in Teams or send an email and I get to choose when to stop my work to respond. And when I really need to focus I can throw on Do Not Disturb mode. In the office “Do Not Disturb” was me booking a conference room for myself to work in silence.
I love how they sometimes record these higher-level presentations, stage lights and all, right in front of where I work in the office. I am way more productive at home.
There are people who have distractions at home and want to escape of course. I’m not stopping them from working in the office though…
wow zoom just wow.
I think its time for you zoomies to start doing the voomies and voom out of that company. lots of nice companies that value you and pay well that are remote.
If they can’t have debates over zoom meetings that’s a culture problem, not a technology problem
Yeah. I doubt they can have debates in person, either. But getting 7 people in a room so that the 2 highest paid ones can ideate all over each other while the other 5 nod along as a paid audience just feels better for those 2 than looking up to see the glassy-eyed stares of people who are trying to get their work done while sitting in on a pointless vanity meeting.
Wow, well said. I wonder if the arguement that “working in the office is important so that younger/newer employees can recieve mentorship” is just a theme and variation on the same thinking.
working in the office is important so that younger/newer employees can recieve mentorship
That has real “I can’t mentor someone unless we’re at the strip club” energy.
Not really. There is a lot of mentor activity that is easier in person because of how asking follow up questions works. In person it is easier to convey intent and ease worry for people doing new things just like how video conferencing can be easier than email depending on the topic. Or how mentoring is generally better than just giving someone a manual and not answering any questions for complex tasks.
That is not to say it is necessary most of the time, and the cries about everyone needing to be in the office because of mentoring doesn’t make sense for people other than the mentor and new staff. That tends to be projection by people who can only handle communication in person.
Maybe it depends on the specific field, but I’ve had no issues mentoring people remotely, and even when I was in the office I was doing it via Teams half the time.
In many contexts it isn’t that hard if you have the tools. The fact that many workplaces skimp on the tools is a them issue, not a mentoring issue.
This is ridiculous. CEO must be a nightmare of a boss
As mandated in their invisible job description
