Do you Zoom-out? And is it impacting your team’s success?

WFH, blended/hybrid teams, “new normal” working, new skills needed by leaders , applied emotional Intelligence?- the workplace has been irrevocably impacted in so many ways in the last 2 years.

One of the main factors that has facilitated these changes, but also created social challenges, is the heavy use of virtual communications platforms such as Teams or Zoom; so much so that researchers at leading universities such as Stanford have been busy analysing the impacts. (If you’ve not read any then there’s a couple of reference links at the end of this article)

So-called Zoom Gloom & Zoom Fatigue are major attitudes that companies are scrambling to address, trying to fix the social deprivation that a lack of face-to-face has been shown to manifest. And fix it they must, as it’s having a big impact on team-building, bonding and effectiveness. ?A simple fix is to re-engineer face-to-face events into a workplace’s operation but the real trick/challenge is to ensure participants walk away with meaningful insights and changed behaviours that benefit the team & the workplace longer term. ?And that’s one of the new reasons that companies are coming to us; for sessions on team-building, bonding and general interpersonal teamwork, that embrace interpersonal & Emotional Intelligence skills.

Recently we had yet another fabulous bunch of people from Mastercard and spent the morning working with them on teamwork including addressing the “Zoom” effect in their extended group. As is often the case nowadays, there were a lot of new team members, departments and/or people, who had never physically met each other so the morning gave them the opportunity to meet, greet & bond. But unlike normal social functions or events, the group was quickly briefed, split into random teams and put to work! With the added challenge of incorporating one of our team coaches - Ziggy, Funky, Angel or Starlight (yup they’re horses) - ?into the newly picked human teams as an equal & valuable team member.

After a quick set of “horsey hellos”, we asked them to work in their teams to solve mental tasks & physical projects which required classic EI team skills such as relationship-building, clear communications (verbal & non-verbal), flexible leadership, trust, respect, empathy …and more. And why horses? Because working with our horses introduced a dynamic that opened up people to receiving more feedback; largely from our horses who are experts at honest, instant & non-judgmental feedback on team behaviour & cohesiveness.

In our first hands-on session, we witnessed participants trying hard to be good team players. However, unconsciously, they were displaying the type of “Zooming out” or zoning-out behaviour we've started to see since Covid impacts:

• Team-tagging in and out - supporting from the sidelines, verbally encouraging, often just one person at a time completed a team task instead everyone working together. People tended to stand back, let a delegated “task leader” do their thing/direct, meantime waiting to be asking to join-in or step up. Mentally, mostly unconsciously, opting or “zooming out”. It’s actually a researched phenomenon called the “Ringelmann Effect”, where individuals put in less effort the bigger the team as they feel less responsibility for ensuring success

• Unused team resources - Unwittingly, participants often simply watched and/or acted passively whilst others deemed “core to the task” did the work. Members would switch back on when given a task or when asked to contribute but, rarely, were they present in the moment unless they have been given an active, distinct task which they could see contributed to the team success.

Our horses found this bizarre – surely all members of the herd/team needed to contribute to the goal success/survival? To them, everyone present had an active role to play in the team at all times. Ziggy & his fellow coaches “voiced” their confusion by often appearing uncooperative, not wanting to move with the team or appearing disengaged from the task at hand. ?I say appearing because, in fact, they are commenting on the disconnected nature of the human. ?On the lack of clear communication, verbal & non-verbal. And on their human team members being unaware of how their inactive mental or physical “distance” to other members pulled energy & focus away from the goal and its successful achievement. They were commenting on the concept of Team Togetherness; acting as one, moving as one, being equally engaged. Here, unlike in the virtual Zoom environment, engagement couldn’t be faked. Lack of Togetherness stood out – well, at least to the horses at this stage! But that was about to change…

We let this to all play out in the first exercise and then debriefed/facilitated the discussion of how the exercise all went, over morning tea. Then highlighted “Zooming out” behaviour to the group. It was like someone turned a light bulb on for people!

“OMG! Itotally realise I’m doing that now. I’m zoning out or zooming out as you call it”

“I thought I was being really supportive with my words - I now see how my physical inaction and lack of active role I was playing was impacting it being achieved”

“the idea that I have a role to play in the team, being active and present even if I’m in a supporting role; that’s a game-changing realisation!”

Cue session 2 and, despite a change of team member (a new horse for each team) and increased communication challenges (senses taken away from each team member) every team achieved MORE: These are some of the words from the session – now echo-ing Emotional Intelligence insight and great interpersonal skills:

• Better, clearer communication (saying & behaving)
• More planning with flexible teamwork to adapt plans/problem-solve

• Increased collaboration with each other with active listening appearing

• Everyone seeing the value of both their role and other’s roles (respect & empathy really)

• People feeling included and acting to include
• Being engaged

A pretty big shift in a very short time – and a bunch of Aha moments that we love to see happening.

In summary, research is proving that the types of Zoom taint we’re seeing in these sessions are present in most hybrid/WFH dominant workplaces nowadays. People forgetting how to truly act as team players. Happily, the design of our sessions allows the effect to be clearly seen & acted upon, behaviours changed and insights taken back into the workplace. “Laughing whilst learning” as a former participant tagged it.

Progressive workplaces are now creating virtual workplace strategies to acknowledge these effects and minimise their impact. From simple effective actions such as ensuring there’s a role/need for everyone who’s in the meeting and breakouts during meetings for social chit-chat opportunity. Through to clever AI apps. But undoubtedly a key contributing factor for team cohesiveness is the ability to create avenues for face-to-face events. Especially:

·??????when the team is newly formed or has new members -?teams connect most at these times ?with F2F allowing rapid understanding of members’ styles & preferences as well as strengths and weaknesses

·??????if the team needs to establish/re-establish “team agreements” – scoping expectations of what work patterns & behaviours look like, leading to stability & performance

·??????or establish or reinforce a team culture of agreed values & behaviour

Part of being human is the need for face-to-face connections and the new workplace needs to ensure teams are provided with sufficient amounts of these bonding, real-life moments in order to operate well.

Hopefully this article might be a catalyst to your team reviewing its behaviour and how to address digital taint.

Or... simply book a morning session with us & our horse teachers to give your team a chance to get some team bonding and a little teamwork tune-up happening. Just call me, Linda, on 0403573379 to schedule your event across Australia.

Finally, as promised, below is a couple of great article links:

HBR: Stop Zoning Out in Zoom Meeting, by Sarah Gershman

Stanford: 4 causes for ‘Zoom fatigue’ and their simple fixes by Vignesh Ramachandran?