Recently, you shared a letter from someone who wrote that they don’t want to talk about their life outside of work with their colleagues, and it got me thinking about the dynamics of the team I work in.
I’ve been at my company for many years. I empathize with the writer of the original letter to a degree – I don’t see work as a means to have my social needs met, and I enjoy working the sort of job that allows me to log in and log out without taking work home with me. I’m not someone who would typically invite coworkers to my wedding or baby shower, or go to a coworker’s house for a housewarming or Christmas party. However, I do like feeling like I know my coworkers and that I’m part of a team. Pre-pandemic when everyone was in the office, I enjoyed talking with coworkers, feeling a sense of camaraderie with them, and knowing what was going on in their lives (broadly! – I’m talking “How is your son doing in his first week of school?” rather than “So how is your son’s bedwetting phase going?”). There were occasional social events and after-work drinks; I would participate around one-third of the time, depending on the event and whether my own circumstances made it convenient. While I enjoyed these events and the time spent socializing with coworkers, my personal life or “real life” would always take priority, and often I’d honestly just rather go home. All of this is to say, for context of what I’m about to write, that I like to think I’m friendly and social, but I’m also an introvert who enjoys the separation of work and home.
Cut to the pandemic, and everyone moved to WFH. My entire team still remains primarily WFH. We all have the option to go into the offices in our various cities, and very occasionally most of us do, but this is typically not something any of us do day-to-day.
Here’s my dilemma, and why the original letter got me thinking about my own team’s dynamics: About half of my team seem to be intensely private and/or camera-shy, and I don’t see or hear from them other than if they ask a work-related question in the work chat. Like: at all. They don’t turn their cameras on during meetings and stay silent towards the end of the meeting when our manager asks us questions about our weekends and tries to get us to chat. In a team of 10-15 or so, only a few people actually speak up during this time. Before the pandemic and in the early days of WFH, our team was structured differently and had more oversight, and these coworkers would usually participate at least a little. Now, we have different managers and more autonomy, and that combined with how long we’ve been WFH means people have stopped caring about the appearance of being “unapproachable.”
This is starting to get to me, more than I’d like and more than I would have assumed would be the case. I like keeping my camera off and staying silent sometimes too when my social battery is low, so it’s not that I don’t relate, but feeling like the few of us who regularly speak up in meetings are speaking to a bunch of brick walls is incredibly demoralizing. This has caused me to realize that I do much better as an employee when I feel in some way connected to my coworkers, which is something I never had the opportunity to realize about myself before the pandemic. When there’s a sense of familiarity there, it’s easier to want to jump in and help someone out on something, or speak up about things, or ask a quick work-related question. When I was regularly coming into contact with my coworkers – not just in my own team but company-wide – in the elevators or in the break room, it instilled in me a greater sense of responsibility and work ethic, as it led to caring more about the bigger picture. Now, I’m finding that I’m only really worrying about my own tiny slice of the company pie. Which should be fine, I guess! But I do better work when I care about the rest of the pie as a whole. The more narrow-sighted I get with my own work, the more I find myself doing the bare minimum and caring less and less. It feels a lot like burnout, but it’s less about the work itself and more about feeling like I’m working within a void.
I’ve spoken to my manager about struggling in this area. He’s quite social and has been trying to get the team to engage. He’s tried multiple ways to encourage a more social dynamic, but every time it’s just the same brick wall, and at this stage he senses it won’t ever change unless he requires participation, which he won’t do. He’s reluctant to require cameras on and I tend to agree with that (and also enjoy that I can leave my own off on days when I look more like Snuffleupagus than a professional human).
A solution we’ve come up with is for me to go into the office semi-regularly, but the only other person on my team who lives in my state has no interest in going in, seemingly ever again, not even for once-off events. I’d worked with this coworker for years before the pandemic and considered her a work friend. She was lovely and social while we were in the office and we had a lot of great conversations. She brought me a souvenir back from an overseas trip and would show me photos of her kid. Now I haven’t seen her face in years and have no idea how she’s doing — and I still work with her every day! Additionally, not many other people go into my office anyway as everyone prefers to WFH, so while it’s nice occasionally running into someone I used to see regularly in the “good old days,” the reality is that I’m still working from a hot desking space with pretty much nobody around. It doesn’t really help. I’m increasingly unsure who even still works at the company anymore.
I suppose my questions are:
1. In response to the original letter writer’s assertion that they don’t want to talk about their personal life at work, and speaking more broadly about people like my coworkers who have basically fallen off the grid since the pandemic: what is your opinion on how much we “owe” our coworkers when it comes to socializing? Shouldn’t a degree of social interaction be expected in any job? Of course, preferring to stick to work talk primarily and not discuss anything private or political is a reasonable boundary to have at work, but doesn’t working in an office environment – online or offline – require understanding that you will occasionally have to make small talk about TV or sports or come up with something nice that you did on the weekend? I don’t want to know how my coworkers vote, whether they get on with their parents, or if they’re in the middle of a divorce, but am I wrong in thinking that I should at least be able to ask my coworkers something innocuous like, “Have you been following the World Cup?” and get a friendly response? Or ANY response?
2. Considering that I now know I work best when I get in some face-to-face time with my colleagues, how should I approach this? Is it simply the case that now that the pandemic has led to a rise in WFH across the board, that this will become the new normal for workplace dynamics, and I need to adjust my expectations and find new ways to feel connected to my work?
I think you are super normal, and your voice has been disproportionately left out of the discussion around remote work. But a ton of people feel like you do (probably at least a plurality, in fact).
It’s normal to want, need, and expect to have relationships with your coworkers that include pleasant conversation beyond a strict work focus. Until remote work because as common as it is now, I don’t think that would have even been questioned — of course a healthy work environment includes building relationships and having some amount of social interaction. There will always be people on both ends of that spectrum (people who want very little interaction with colleagues and people who want more of it than most) but the majority of people are somewhere in the broad middle of that. (It’s worth noting that people on the less social end of that spectrum tend to be over-represented in internet commenting sections — I see it here all the time — but that’s not reflective of real life. Also, even here, those voices are usually outliers but tend to be so vociferous that they feel like they’re a larger proportion of people than they really are. I once looked at actual numbers on this and it was fascinating to see how in the minority they really were.)
In any case, let’s state it clearly for the record: relationships at work matter! Not only do they make work more pleasant, but they have substantive work pay-offs too: When you have good relationships with colleagues, they’re usually more willing to go out of their way to help when you need it (beyond the bare minimum of what their job requires, like if you need something expedited or if you need help getting something fixed quickly rather than next month). They’re more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt, toss ideas around with you, and approach you with questions. Good work relationships can also give you the context to understand someone’s actions/mood/tone, and can help you access mentorship or support that might otherwise be less in reach. Good work relationships also mean you’ll be more likely to hear useful information outside of official channels, which could be anything from “That job you were interested in is about to open up again” to “The reason your travel costs are getting more scrutiny now is X.” Plus, when people know and like you, you’re more likely to come to mind when they’re thinking of someone to lead an interesting project or recommend for a job. And on and on.
I do think you’re somewhat off-base, though, to frame work relationships in terms of what colleagues owe each other. Colleagues do owe it to each other to be reasonably pleasant to work with, and should expect that in a workplace they’re going to encounter some amount of social chit-chat and shouldn’t recoil when it happens. If someone is rude or chilly in response to a coworker asking if they’ve been following the World Cup or how their weekend was, that’s a problem. But it doesn’t sound like you’ve been getting rude or chilly responses; it sounds more like those social conversations just aren’t coming up organically now that most of you are remote. When you’re in person, it’s natural to chat at the start of a meeting or when you run into someone in the kitchen. When most of a team is remote, those things aren’t happening — and if you don’t work somewhere that’s deliberate about creating opportunities for them or happens to have gregarious employees who create those opportunities on their own, those interactions can disappear altogether.
It also sounds like your team meetings aren’t being run well. I’d argue it’s generally fine for people to have their cameras off — there are lots of reasons for why someone might prefer that, including not having a private enough workspace at home — but it is a problem that only a few of you talk in meetings and you don’t get any response from the others when you do (assuming these meetings are ones where you’d normally expect fuller participation, which sounds like the case). That’s largely on your manager, who needs be clearer about what kind of participation is expected in your meetings.
But ultimately, I think this just isn’t an ideal job for you anymore. There are lots of jobs where remote teams do engage and build relationships and chat with each other; this just isn’t one of them. It also might be that you’re someone who doesn’t thrive on a team where most people are remote and you’d be happier with one where most people are in the office more. There are also people who would love how your job works, so it’s not necessarily a failing of the job itself; it’s just not an optimal fit for you.
#coworkers #disappeared #pandemic #Manager
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