I Miss Faces

I love working from home. I’ve done it a couple or few days week for most of the past two decades, and it has some serious benefits:

• Fewer distractions means higher productivity.
• My commute takes less time than if I worked at a lemonade stand in my front yard.
• My transportation and parking expenses are so low I can spend more on snacks. (We can put that in the negative category too.)
• I haven’t paid a dime for dry cleaning in a year (and yes, I smell fine).
• My footwear can be shaped like fluffy dinosaurs and no one’s the wiser.

The list goes on and on.

That’s not to say that working from home is without its pitfalls. For one thing, working where you live makes it harder to be “there” for your home life and your family. Are you ever really “off” when your phone can vie for your attention with a buzz and your laptop is just steps away? How are your stress levels? How are you sleeping? How are the relationships that matter most to you?

These are serious questions and concerns but they’re not new or unexplored. I’ve seen countless posts, articles, and threads on a variety of social media about these things.

I’ve seen less conversation about the loss of our work interactions and relationships. A year ago, we were spending more of our waking hours with our coworkers than we were with our families. They may not have been friends in the sense that you saw them outside of work hours, but they are people you care about, saw daily, and were able to talk to in person. Now we communicate mainly with texts, emails, or IM/chat.

The impromptu conversations in the hall, the discussions about nothing in the kitchen, the lean-back quick questions that being there in person give you? Gone. We are currently working in the antithesis of the collaborative office so many employers embraced. They imagined an environment in which people would be able to instantly and easily share ideas, consult, advise, and polish ideas till they glimmer. (What, too much?)

What we’re missing now is the casual contact that physical presence provides—the breathing room required for creation, ideation, and the freedom to explore. Texts, chats, and even emails are tools designed to convey things as quickly and succinctly as possible and are anathema to creativity.

They also lack key components that help with understanding:

• Facial expressions
•  Eye contact
• Body language
• Vocal inflection
• Delivery (sarcasm, jokey, funny, serious, etc.)
• Immediate feedback that tells you whether people are getting it

These are all critically important to communication and you know how many you get from texts, IM, and email? Approximately zero. Nada.

Typical text exchange:

Employee 1: Meeting at 10?

Employee 2: Yep

Employee 2: [thumbs up]

Typical email exchange:

Email 1: Thank you for taking the time to bring me up to speed on _____. I’ve made some edits to the document you sent to help with flow, and simplified a few things to shorten it. When you get a moment, take a look and let me know if you have any questions or edits.

Employee 2: thx

Was that “thx” snippy? Sarcastic? Was the thumbs-up emoji just their way of saying they were done with the conversation? Should you take your last email getting ghosted personally or were they just busy?

This is a huge loss, all of it, but it’s where we are for now. But there are things you can do to mitigate the impact on your life, your work, and your wellbeing.

• Pick up the phone if the conversation requires. If you want a rule, say that any conversation that’s going to require more than ___ volleys should be a phone call. You choose the number.
• Include in your scheduled meetings some time to think and collaborate.
• Do a lunch webinar with your core group and talk about things on- or off-topic that wouldn’t come up in your task-centric communications.
• Send a full thank you email for great work.
• Send a (clean, PC) joke … just because.
• Here’s a weird one: Always reply to any communication in full sentences that convey your true feelings. “thanks”—no capitalization, no punctuation—gives the reader zero clues about what the sender was thinking or feeling.

None of these things feel normal, I know, but precious little about these days is. These are ideas designed to replace some of the incidental contact so many of us are missing right now, and they’re crazy enough that they just might work.