Learning from Zoom fatigue and Samaritans: the Third Zone

Hello and welcome back! My first ‘Learning from Zoom fatigue’ article drew upon the interviews I conducted with Samaritans volunteers in the first weeks of lockdown (whilst we still remembered the old normal), exploring the ways we can facilitate meaningful conversations (particularly in the context of work, though the implication reach past that realm). Video calls are great for maintaining already-developed personal relationships, but without an understanding of each other’s personal body language, their visual cues are significantly less helpful, to the point of often actually being distracting and even stressful. I recommended coworkers make efforts to facilitate active listening, which may mean simply moving more calls onto the phone.

But this is only part of the issue. Other valuable experiences within communication have been lost - or made scarce - by the stampede from office to video call. My previous article dealt with the therapeutic quality of conversations wherein the talkers feel listened to without feeling exposed, the same feeling that Samaritans offer callers. But there is another enormously valuable quality of communication that is crucial to Samaritans’ work, a quality which the organisation has maintained through its key-worker status (branches have stayed open, undergoing an deep clean before and after each shift). A quality that volunteers lost in their non-Samaritans day jobs: compartmentalization. When virtual office calls occur in one’s actual home, on the same medium as personal calls, with nothing to distinguish the two, this totally hinders compartmentalization. Once unpacked, this problem requires a grander, organisation-level solution than the previous article’s issue.

Each time I interviewed a Samaritan volunteer whose day job had become remote, I asked how the move had detracted from the enjoyment of work, and additionally how it had affected the quality of their work. A consistent answer to both questions was the loss of casual ‘coffee point’ discussions; grabbing someone for a quick breakout, bumping into someone at the water cooler, or having a fuller chat at the cafeteria or a nearby café. One respondent who flies in his spare time compared it to ‘hangar talk’; he often discoverred a crucial piece of information in the casual conversations that occurred before a flight. It is enormously easier to have a low pressure conversation like this when aided by a change of scene, seperate from the site of grand tensions.

Alex, a respondent whose primary job is for a tour operator, was particularly helpful in explaining the significance of these conversations, whose intimacy has been lost with the move to video calls; ‘it’s not the same as a private conversation over coffee, Zoom would be a very difficult forum to do that.’ Over the last ten years, issues of mental health have come into general public conversation, particularly the understanding that it’s important to be able to talk about your emotions and personal issues, resulting in the Covid-era practice of non-work-related calls wherein work teams ask each other how they are doing. However, this is often not the kind of emotional support that professional team-mates want from eachother.

Alex helped me understand that coffee point discussions about non-personal subjects such as work, tv and the news, provide a totally different therapeutic experience. These playful, expressive chats allow colleagues to feel connected to each other, to affirm eachother by showing interest, and thus implicitly saying ‘you are interesting’, without compromising compartmentalization. Alex views her coworkers as ‘like family’; they enjoy a lively social atmosphere at work and are required to essentially take holidays together due to the nature of the job, thus exposing multiple facets of their personality to eachother. However Alex still maintains compartmentalization at work, keeping her personal life to herself; ‘if someone asks how my weekend was, I would tend to say nice.’

It’s important to note that the compartmentalized habit of not talking about one’s home life and personal issues doesn’t mean that the talker is unwilling to connect with their coworkers, it can facilitate connection, by removing distractions. Of course it is important to talk about the hopes, fears and challenges of life with someone, but simply stating them in conversation with a coworker may have an adverse effect, bringing those pressures back to the front of one’s mind in one's work life. Robin, a respondent who works with vulnerable children, and has strong emotional connections to her coworkers (like Alex), actively compartmentalizes; ‘some of our work is upsetting, I have to cut off when I come home, I can’t let the two seep into each other otherwise I won’t be able to switch off. It’s like being a Samaritan, once you leave the building you leave it there.’ Samaritans have continued to use their shared branches throughout lockdown for two main reasons; confidentiality rules prevent them from discussing callers with anyone outside the organization, and moreover, they also must not be alone in carrying callers’ emotional weight; it is essential that they can talk about calls together, in the branch. By occupying a shared space, and discussing the work and issues associated with said space whilst inside it, Samaritans are able to pull off essential work that would otherwise be emotionally debilitating.

So, how can organizations utilize the power of compartmentalization, facilitating connection and affirmation without providing a literal shared space? My answer is that work-based communication must to do more than organize tasks, it needs to help organize head space. I suggest that this is achieved through the creation of a virtual ‘third place’, based on Starbucks’ concept, whereby their cafes aim to be the only place you need other than home and work. I call this the Third Zone, a virtual space which does not simulate an office or bedroom, separate from the mental weight of work and home. Rather than using the same virtual space to connect and work, design another that facilitates connection.

This idea was inspired by my interview with Jordan, a volunteer whose day-job company provides engineering software and support to the upstream oil and gas industry. In the runnup to the crisis, Jordan happened to be developing an online learning tool designed to teach clients how to use the company’s software, one which could be taught through free online teaching sessions on Zoom. This project accelerated at the start quarantine, in the hopes of maintaining relationships with clients, working on the principle that busy hands are happy hands. The first session was advertised on LinkedIn under the heading: ‘Learn Something New’, and took advantage of Zoom’s screen-sharing capacities, allowing a central tutor to lead explanations, whilst an assistant tutor wandered through the virtual classroom, looking over at students' desks. The advertisement received an unexpected mass of responses. This is partially because the company recruits to a model; all its engineers are characteristic, clearly trustworthy, and good at communication. This reputation was combined with the sessions’ nature as virtual classrooms (not virtual lectures or meetings), placing organizational structure on top of Zoom’s technology, to offer clients a space where they could learn and be affirmed, where they could be told ‘well done, you got the hang of it'.

A great example of a non-work-based Third Zone is Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the surprise hit Nintendo game released on the 20th of March. It sold five million digital copies in its first month, breaking the record for most digital video games sold in a single month, a surprising feat for a game with no enemies or levels to defeat. Players begin the game by entering a deserted island and buying their virtual home with a loan, a loan that they are then required to pay off by performing menial tasks such as fishing, whilst they spend the rest of their time decorating and customizing their home and island.

The clincher is that New Horizons' online functions allow players to visit eachother’s islands and simply spend time together, whilst the warm aesthetic making it easy to simply hang out without attempting to really achieve anything; appreciating eachother's designs, watching the pixelated sea from a bench or dancing in a virtual nightclub. I’ve talked to friends who went on virtual dates using the game, whilst news stories tell of family members who have used it to stay connected, and virtual weddings held as a surrogate for cancelled ceremonies (a image of which is this article’s banner), with one of the betrothed commenting: “this made me so happy, I don’t even have the words to describe how much it meant to me.” What is particularly interesting about the game is that it is not totally escapist; beneath the cute color-scheme is a practical life simulation, facilitating the human process of connection. 

How can companies create their own Third Zones? Well, my first step would be to distinguish the Second Zone that hosts task-based meetings, to make it easier to be focus in ‘work-mode’ without thinking about your previous Zoom, be it catch-up or quiz. Zoom’s customizable backgrounds can be amusing, but they offer a genuinely valuable opportunity for visual streamlining, as does formal clothing and virtual eye contact (looking at the camera when speaking), as I mentioned in the previous article.

The Third Zone itself requires further organisation because it must encourage different social dynamics and mental modes, as exemplified by Jordan’s lessons. An interesting example of this which happened by accident, is the alternative uses of virtual reality software used by some engineers, as respondent Frankie shared with me. Engineers use ‘Building Information Management Systems’ to design their structures, with 3D goggles allowing them to enter, explore and watch the building simulation, and increasingly use this technology to hold meetings within said simulations; engineers and clients’ faces are beamed into the simulation via cameras, where they appear floating above grey androgynous bodies. In the previous article, I mentioned Frankie’s scepticism of most people’s ability to read body language, but interestingly he described this ability as a benefit of virtual reality; ‘they move around the space; you can see people agreeing with somebody, they tend to drift towards them.’ So it's not just gamers who enjoy the expressive capacities of virtual reality, perhaps Animal Crossing too shall have unexpected alternative uses in the future...

Until that day comes, my personal recommendation for the ideal Third Zone forum is Icebreaker, an online platform created by a 2-year old American start up. Though it uses video calls technology, Icebreaker is differentiated from Zoom in that meeting organisers can set times, themes and optional conversation prompts for chats between meeting members, or use templates such as Hometowns, pictured to the left. I stumbled upon Icebreaker by total accident, through an artist named Kindness whose music and philosophy I adore, who used Icebreaker to organise a conversation between fans about 6 weeks into quarantine.

Upon entering the meeting, I found myself in a text chatbox with about 40 fans, before a live video box appeared in the middle, from which Kindness addressed the group and explained the subject of our first discussion. When this activity began, an opt-in button appeared in the middle of the screen, and upon pressing it I was set up in a randomly allocated video call with another member of the group, with a ‘prompt card’ button to the side of the screen that we could click if we wanted to nudge the conversation along. Once this was over and we returned to the group chat, Kindness asked the group what had come out of this chat, and then responded to those of us who felt that our thoughts were worth sharing with the group, before the next activity began. Unlike Gallery Mode’s simulation of a proffessional interview, this created the feeling of a pub meetup, wherein the wider group will occasionally break into smaller segments, one of which feels confident that their individual conversations had legs and brings it back to the group. It felt like a breath of fresh air in many ways.

I got in touch with Icebreaker’s COO Lisa Conn, who has experience in Obama's campaign, MIT’s Media Lab (producing first visualizations of the 2016 electorate’s ideological polarization) and Facebook (working in Facebook Groups to ‘strengthen community, reduce polarization, and build empathy’). When I asked her to explain the thought behind Icebreaker’s functionality, she stated that 'we’ve designed the platform to be opt-in every step of the way — you opt in to go on stage, you opt in to join a match, you opt in to flip a card — which keeps the energy up because all participants are there with purpose and intention.' The result is a conversation medium which sidesteps the issues of compartmentalization, through the thoughtful construction of a self-contained, separate social zone which encourages members’ expression, and also sidesteps my previous article’s issue of intrusion. Conn explained that 'our goal is to strengthen communities that matter to people by giving them the sense of togetherness that they typically only feel in person.’

I hope that we can all take the oppurtinity to reflect on our learnings from quarantine, to examine the way we communicate, to appreciate the mechanisms of social connection and grasp their importance. To close out, I'll quote a fantastic article that I read at the start of lockdown, which crucially inspired the direction of my research project. It was written by Dr Aisha Ahmad, a political science professor with experience working under extreme crises. She stated that the first step in adapting to crisis must be developing security, which requires a 'strategy for social connectedness.' Once this is in place, the mental shift can begin;

'Now more than ever, we must abandon the performative and embrace the authentic. Our essential mental shifts require humility and patience. Focus on real internal change. These human transformations will be honest, raw, ugly, hopeful, frustrated, beautiful, and divine. And they will be slower than keener academics are used to. Be slow. Let this distract you. Let it change how you think and how you see the world. Because the world is our work. And so, may this tragedy tear down all our faulty assumptions and give us the courage of bold new ideas.'