Opinion
An emotional chasm of long covid needs to be bridged
Summary
- A widening gap between employers and their employees can be tackled by increasing face time
Where should employees work from? Office or home? In virtual meetings, should employees keep their cameras switched on? Answers to these questions that sprang up during the covid pandemic are critical to the very future of organizations. There is a point of view that as long as the employees are completing the jobs assigned to them in time, it does not matter where they work from or whether their faces are visible at online meetings. Although there might be some small debates about the productivity of those working from home, the overall feeling is that most organizations that allow work-from-home have not reported any loss of productivity. But does the responsibility of an employee begin and end with the timely completion of assigned tasks? Or do the responsibilities of a corporate citizen go beyond?
The view that the organization-employee relationship is all about getting work done stems from the traditional belief that all human behaviour goes by a rational process. In this view, what can be measured—amount of work done, quality of the job, time taken to complete an assignment, etc—is all that matters. But new learnings about human behaviour, especially from brain studies, reiterate the fact human behaviour is mostly an emotional activity, work included. The employee’s job satisfaction level, degree of trust in the organization and comfort with its culture all matter a lot. So, contributing to emotional facets of work is an employee responsibility that is at least as important as completing tasks in time, if not more.
For a long time, it was believed that all the intelligence of a person resides within the individual’s brain. Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach’s in their book The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone reminds us that except the truly erudite, few actually have this knowledge available in their own memories. They even contend that the very idea of individual thinking is a myth. What gave Homo sapiens an edge over all other animals and turned us into masters of this planet was our unparalleled ability to think together in large groups. This puts paid to the emerging belief that people working alone in the isolation of their homes are at their productive best. If the intelligence of an organization resides in the collective wisdom of all its employees, then creating many opportunities for employees to create connections between each other become very important.
Mirror neurons are those neurons in the brain’s frontal cortex that we use to interpret the intentions of others. The mirror neuronal circuits of our brain respond to the body language, facial expressions and gestures used by another person. This soon leads to neural synchronization between interacting brains. Soon a behavioural synchrony via facial expressions, gestures and oral speech gets generated among those engaged in such interaction. This behavioural rhythm leads to improved communication and the fostering of trust between team members.
Mirror neurons are best activated in face-to-face interactions. One of the primary benefits of keeping cameras on during virtual meetings is that it enables us to pick up the facial cues of others in the meeting, which also activates mirror neurons among its participants, to the extent possible. When we can see someone’s facial expressions and body language, it helps understand their thoughts and feelings better. This reduces uncertainty, even if strong incentives exist to distrust the other. Non-verbal cues like seeing colleagues smile, nod in agreement or bury their head in their hands in disappointment can provide valuable cues that are often lost in text-based communication. The neural features of mediums like telephone and e-mail pale in comparison with the multimodal neural synchronization that underlies face-to-face communication. But with today’s tendency of many employees to switch off their cameras during virtual meetings, the ability to read others’ facial expressions and body language is curtailed, and with it also the ability to create an emotional connection with others.
Switched-on cameras have other benefits too. One of the drawbacks of working from home for many people is that their work identity and home identity have gotten entangled, creating stress in their daily lives. With cameras on, participants would have to dress more presentably, as if they are in office. The ritual of changing into work attire helps one make a smooth transition from one’s home identity to one’s work identity.
Large geographical distances between employees are inevitable in a global organization. Flexible work is already the norm in many organizations. Even in the same city, many employees working from home results in fewer opportunities for face-to face interactions within a team than our pre-pandemic pattern. This will, no doubt, increase the emotional distance between even those who work in the same team, not to mention employees working in other departments. For a large number of employees today, the only chance of any face-to-face interaction at all is during virtual meetings. Unless a clear camera-on policy is adopted for such online confabulations, the emotional distance between employees will only increase further.
A ‘Great Resignation’ wave was the immediate impact of the pandemic on organizations. Now they must deal with the prolonged effects of ‘long covid,’ the most serious being a widening emotional chasm between employers and employees.
