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Every two weeks or so, a number appears somewhere in the world that I find understandable and troubling.
It’s the percentage of people who constantly say they don’t want to go back to working full-time in the office. Almost 60% of British workers said they felt backwards that way in September last year and also In March this year, though more than a third of the population of the United Kingdom had had at least one stroke of Covid at the time.
In the United States, it passed the proportion of workers who would prefer to continue working as far away as possible 35 percent in September, up from 44% in January. More recent European research found that 97% of people who have been at home prefer to stay there at least part of the week once the offices reopen.
Since I am one of the millions delighted to free myself from a hasty displacement and the boredom of presentism, these findings seem absolutely rational. But they are also worrying because there is a darker reason that even well-paid and valued people in high jobs may not be in a hurry to get back to the office: long before the outbreak, they were alone.
His relationships with the people in the office were shallow. Worse, his sense of isolation may have had less to do with his personal life than the way his teamwork was organized.
This is a finding of studies by Mark Mortensen, associate professor of organizational behavior at the Insead School of Business in France, and Constance Hadley, an organization psychologist at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University.
Mortensen says they were shocked after polling hundreds of global executives just before the Covid outbreak emptied offices around the world. Although executives belonged to three teams on average, nearly 80% said they struggled to connect with other team members and 58% felt their social relationships at work were superficial.
Researchers say one of the reasons is that teams have changed drastically since they began replacing traditional hierarchical work structures more than 30 years ago.
Before, one could expect to work in a manageable size team with the same group of people doing the same thing for a relatively long time.
But as corporate work has become globalized and 24 hours a day, teams are expected to be bigger, more agile and more profitable. People come together for shorter periods, depending on the skills needed for a given project, and then leave elsewhere. Or they share work with other people in different time zones, so projects can be done all day or work part-time on multiple teams at once.
All of this is good for the flexibility and efficiency of an organization, but not so much for humans, who may struggle to nominate each member of their group.
“I don’t know who is part of my team,” one researcher told investigators. “Every Monday someone comes in who tells me he was assigned to something and that the other guy who worked there before he left.”
“I’m interchangeable,” said another. “They have achieved this so that everyone can do my job on the team. Maybe I would miss them, but I’m not so sure. “
The pandemic has obviously fueled the lack of companionship, but this research suggests that re-occupying everyone in the office will not completely solve the problem. And hybrid work can make things worse, Mortensen told me last week, because people will work at very different times.
“This is a problem that existed as long as there was shift work,” he said. “We’ve seen it in factories for the last 50 years or so, but suddenly it’s something we’re starting to see more of, thanks to hybrid work and flexible time and that sort of thing, even in the work of knowledge.” .
What can be done? Mortensen and Hadley say the first thing to do is assess whether loneliness exists. If you do, consider creating basic equipment with a common mission that lasts for years, not weeks. Also, make sure team leaders understand that loneliness in the workplace can be structural and not personal, so people won’t fix it on their own. Finally, don’t expect it to disappear just so everyone can get back to the office.
Twitter: @pilitaclark
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