Post-Covid, Management Has Changed Forever
Whatever one might think of the old-fashioned 9-to-5 grind at the workplace, it had one significant advantage for social animals like us: it required us to be together and to work together, face-to-face.
Post-Covid, we have lost that. Pew Research determined that:
44% of all workers work at home sometimes.
65% of college graduates work from home.
53% of high-income earners work from home.
Working from home isolates us, and white it is certainly freeing to not need to go to the office every day, I treat many people who suffer mightily because they no longer have the social interactions that work thrust upon them.
Most people seem to prefer the new way; people want flexibility to manage their personal and professional lives. LinkedIn calls it the “Great Reshuffle,” where employees rethink their career paths and job priorities. Money still talks, but for some, meaningful work, a supportive culture, and opportunities for growth talk louder. Work-life balance takes precedence.
Post-Covid Hybrid Workplaces Isolate Us
This seems positive at first glance, but the actual impact, as I’ve seen in my practice, is to isolate people.
MIT found that people who are in a room together will synch up their brainwaves as part of their collaborative interactions. They have a lot of information about the other person that doesn’t come in the form of language. They can continuously monitor their facial expressions, their body language, and they are unconsciously aware of the phonemes produced by the other person’s brain hormones. That rich well of sensory perception has always been a crucial aspect of socialization, and it’s lost in online meetings.
People’s mental health suffers for its absence. I see this clearly in my practice. It affects everyone, but it is especially hard on young people who lost crucial developmental years to the Covid lockdown, and people who have always had a hard time socially. It’s also very hard on people who live in difficult situations or who have toxic relationships in their home environments. Even with healthy relationships at home, being stuck with the same people for too much time can become dangerously repetitive.
People try to focus entirely on the job and the money, and as a coping mechanism that’s pretty constructive, but ultimately the lack of in-person social interaction starts to hurt. The lack of social variety deadens us. So does the lack of new social challenges.
While the 9-to-5 might have been a grind, it also gave us consistent periods of sustained social interaction. When a person’s only social interaction in a day is limited to two or three Zoom meetings, where they can put on whatever act is needed, they miss out on the formative, demanding sort of social skills that were used routinely in an in-person workplace.
The Dark Side of Hybrid Workplaces
The workplace is going through an evolution similar to the one that much of humanity went through with the advent of social media. At first, social media seemed awesome. But then its dark side reared its ugly head. Bullying, astonishing negativity, and outright cruelty blossomed when people knew they would never have to deal with their victims in the flesh.
In the same way that the anonymity of social media enabled people to show their worst selves, virtual meetings and a lack of social interaction has freed people to show their worst selves in the real world, too. Workplace violence is on the rise. I have worked with clients who were sent to online courses teaching them how to defend themselves if a meeting erupted in violence. That would only happen between people who were not properly socialized.
Other employers, who I know through my clients, have taken a traditional path that is fraught with danger. They attempt to create camaraderie by normalizing heavy alcohol use. Employees are invited to parties, some of them online, where drinking will be a big part of “breaking the ice.” Cliques of employees will “pregame” these get together by holding a private party beforehand where they begin drinking. Many people now consider “day drinking” normal behavior, sometimes beginning their daily intake not long after breakfast, and often in the confidence of co-workers.
People have used alcohol to bond for millennia, and while it may have its role, what I’m seeing far exceeds any normal use. The benchmark for moderation used to be one, maybe two drinks a day, but now your second drink is just one of your “pregame” drinks.
The pressure to conform is overwhelming, especially considering the fact that these parties are among the few social opportunities many people have. There’s pressure to be “on the team,” and your ability to drink seems to have a direct impact on your upward mobility within the company. Alcohol abuse will make the overall situation worse, depriving people of the ability to cope, depriving them of authentic friendships, and throwing open the door for violent escalations.
No Simple Solution, But a Universal Truth
Today’s corporate leaders are the first ones who have to deal with a hybrid workplace. There is no simple solution.
Loosening the rules by bringing alcohol into online meetings in an effort to overcome the limitations of Zoom is not necessarily an evil thing to do.
Pew found that the need for mental health services in the workplace has increased since Covid, and some employers try to be helpful by de-stigmatizing mental health needs and offering therapy to their employees. But offering therapy to stressed employees is not necessarily a cure-all.
Ultimately, what matters most is the quality of leadership a company can deliver. People don’t want the “impression” that they’re having fun, or the “impression” that they are making friends. They want fun and friends. An employer can’t generate that for them. But an employer can make sure that the social interactions that take place at work have the ring of high quality.
It’s best if they set an example themselves, but their most important example doesn’t come from how much they drink or how they attend a Zoom meeting. The most important thing leadership can bring to the table is a sense of purpose. When people can align around a purpose, it is far more likely that they will have healthier social interactions.
A shared sense of purpose creates teamwork that is professionally, personally and emotionally satisfying. When real teamwork arises, people are able to bond in ways that are truly healthy.
The companies I told you about that encourage drinking are ones that pit employees against each other, and ones that are wholly focused on greed. Few companies fall into those categories, so I think that most leadership teams can accomplish a great deal by imparting a sense of purpose to their employees.
