You or a colleague has applied for a new job, made it through not 3 but 4 interviews and then—dead silence.
You have a student who has an interview scheduled with an HR leader for an assignment and the leader backs out right before the interview.
You send a prospective client a requested scope of work and proposal and never hear anything back even after multiple contact attempts.
You have a new employee scheduled to start, does not show up on the start date and never responds to any emails or phone calls.
Any of this sound familiar? Yeah, I thought so. After having some of these happen to me, I asked the students in my class if this is happening to them. Even they are not immune to the mysterious disappearing connections and relationships. I asked a follow-up question---Are they experiencing more of this since COVID, about the same, or less? They answered with a resounding MUCH MORE. This isn’t to say there weren’t issues before COVID. However, I believe what we are experiencing is more than the occasional ghosting.
Over the last two years we have retreated into our homes, into our social media accounts, and into smaller and smaller worlds. In those two years, we all wondered what the impact would be on children who were socially isolated. The social aspects of their learning and growth were dependent on interacting with their peers. Would their psychological growth be underdeveloped? Would they be able to recover after going back to school in person and engage in extracurricular activities again? What long-term effects would we see? I had the same wonderings about my adult colleagues.
There are many thoughts and theories about the impact of the social isolation many of us faced. I am sure we all have our stories or experiences of how things have changed in our interactions with each other. In that first year, it made sense we had to use different ways of communicating and interacting. Most of that first year was spent on just trying to get through one day at a time and relying on the virtual world and social distance strategies to do all the things we routinely did in close connection with others. The second year seemed a lot like the first year.
Just how loose have our connections become? How can we tighten our connections that have been worn down and out of practice for 2 years? This concept really hit home when I was reading a recent article in the Atlantic, “Why Are People Acting So Weird” by Olga Khazan. In Khazan’s article she discusses many reasons that may be behind some of the strange behavior. The one section that jumped out for me was the idea that as social beings, the social isolation has changed us and loosened the bindings we have toward one another. Yeah, sure we had Zoom, Teams, and other ways to “connect and interact”. We heard a lot of “we can be just as productive without being face-to-face and in the office.” We were able to get work done, be productive, and still keep everything functioning.
I wonder if you experienced what I experienced in that “productive” virtual space? Many more email misunderstandings that have to be untangled. Virtual meetings where people do not turn on their cameras or turn on their cameras and are not really paying attention. You wonder what they are doing or you can see they are doing email or doing something else entirely. You can tell because you ask a question, and the person has no idea what the topic is and asks you to ask the question again. I believe in that virtual world; something gets left behind that is critical to building relationships with each other.
There are unintended consequences from having to rely on contactless experiences and a greater dependance on virtual and electronic communications. It can show up as feeling less responsible to each other. In many ways we have gotten out of practice maintaining and demonstrating norms of how to work and interact with each other that create connections and engagement. Now that we are beginning to re-engage with others in share space again, how do we strengthen the ties of community and responsibility with each other? How do we go from those loose connections to tighter connections with each other? What tools can we use? How long do you think it will take?