The loneliness of a modern office teammate

[ad_1]
Once a week or so, a number is created somewhere in the world that I find understandable and disturbing.
It’s a percentage of those who say they don’t want to go back to work full time in the office. Nearly 60% of British workers said they felt that way back in September last year and also in March this year, however more than a third The UK population already had at least one Covid jab.
In the US, the share of workers who preferred to continue working as far as possible was taken out 35 percent from September to 44 percent in January. Newer European research 97% of people who have stayed at home would prefer to stay there at least once a week after the offices reopen.
Since I am one of the millions who is freed from the fast-paced journey and freed from the fatigues of presentism, these findings seem entirely rational. But they are also worrying because there is a darker reason why even well-paid and valued people in high jobs are in no hurry to return to the office: long before they exploded, they were alone.
Their relationship with the people in the office was superficial. Worse, feelings of isolation may have less to do with his or her personal life than the ways he or she organizes work in groups.
That is a discovery studies Mark Mortensen, associate professor of organizational behavior at Insead Business School in France, and Constance Hadley, organizational psychologist at Questrom School of Business at Boston University.
Mortensen said they were shocked after hundreds of executives around the world were surveyed before the Covid blast emptied offices around the world. Although the average manager is from three groups, nearly 80% said they have made an effort to connect with other team members and 58 percent believe that social work relationships are superficial.
Researchers say one reason is that the group has changed dramatically since they began replacing traditional hierarchical work structures more than 30 years ago.
Previously, you could expect to work in a size management team with the same group of people who do pretty much the same thing at the same time.
But as corporate work has become more global and 24-hour, teams are expected to be larger, lighter and more profitable. People come in for shorter periods of time, depending on the skills needed for a particular project, and then move on elsewhere. Either they share work from other hours with other areas, so projects can be done 24 hours a day, or work in groups in several part-time jobs at the same time.
All of this is good for the flexibility and efficiency of an organization, but not so good for humans, who are struggling to name each member of their team.
“I don’t know who’s on my team,” one director told investigators. “Every Monday, someone comes up and tells me that he was assigned to something and that the other guy who worked before he left.”
“I’m interchangeable,” said another. “They’ve got everyone to do my job as a team. Maybe they’ll miss me, but I’m not so sure.”
The pandemic has fueled a lack of friendship, of course, but this research suggests that putting it back in the office won’t completely solve the problem. And hybrid work can make things worse, Mortensen told me last week, because people will work incredibly different schedules.
“It’s a problem that’s been there while you’ve been working shifts,” he said. “We’ve seen it in factories for the last 50 years or so, but it’s something we’ve suddenly started to see more of, thanks to hybrid work and flexion and things like that, as well as knowledge work.”
What can be done? According to Mortens and Hadley, the first thing to do is to assess whether loneliness exists. If so, consider creating basic groups with a common mission in recent years, not weeks. Also, make sure that team leaders understand that loneliness in the workplace can be structural, not personal, so people won’t fix it on their own. In the end, don’t expect them to disappear because they’ve all returned to the office.
Twitter: @pilitaclark
[ad_2]
Source link