Disconnectivity
Month 9 of the pandemic and we’re getting close…to the halfway point.
It’s painfully apparent that we’re not getting close to anything that we really want to get close to. Not close to celebrating at weddings and birthday parties. Not close to cheering at our kids sports and dance competitions. Not close to hugging elderly parents in their senior living communities. There’s not much social about social distancing these days. The only thing that people are happy about being disconnected from is their cable provider.
People are feeling disconnected physically, which is leading to a critical level of emotional disconnection. Creating personal relationships during the pandemic has been particularly challenging; while traditional dating has been widely deemed as unsafe, there’s been a sharp increase in activity for virtual and online dating services. Match reports a record-level 40% increase during the past few months for user activity, engagements and dates; messaging on Hinge was up 30% and Tinder had over 3 billion swipes in a single day in March. In a world of Big Data I’m waiting for someone to do the regression analysis for COVID positive cases measured against the Horniness Index. If this breaks along red state and blue state lines as I anticipate, the title of the report could be Swipe Right, Wipe Left.
Perhaps single Americans could learn from how the Chinese deal with a desperate dating scene: by celebrating it! The one-child policy instituted in China around 1980 has resulted in a larger single male population, which led a bunch of students at Nanjing University back in 1993 to proclaim November 11th as Singles Day (11.11, get it?). An estimated 200 million single people in China celebrated their unattached status by racking up $115 billion of sales items online (for the record, that’s twice what was spent on Singles Day 2019). If money can’t buy you happiness, at least it can rent it for a while.
Back on the U.S. work front, we are starting to hit the wall in our Work From Home marathon. The US Department of Labor announced this week that 3 million American workers voluntarily left their jobs in September, which is the largest monthly count since the pandemic began. “Voluntarily” meaning that these workers were neither fired nor furloughed; the report framed this trend as a positive sign of an economic recovery, assuming that people were leaving jobs with high confidence that they could find an equal or better position. This is a particular rosy view when you consider that over 85% of the workers who left are women; and a major cause of their leaving is the untenable nature of working from home with school-age children home all the time, or the lack of child-care solutions if they are working in-office.
I see an accompanying cause for the exodus of women from the Work From Home arena: the inability to replace the rich relationships that are formed with co-workers when you’re physically around them 50 hours a week. Gallup, the renowned consultancy that has deep expertise in employee engagement and corporate culture, have long touted the connection between employees who say “I have a best friend at work” and their subsequent high level of engagement and performance. The importance of the “best friend” goes far beyond having a steady lunch partner to dish on company gossip; the friend is a source of encouragement, a sounding board for big ideas, a window into alternative views, and a primary source for feelings of belonging and trust. The best friend is also a reliable coping mechanism for getting through difficult periods at work. But since it’s much harder to feel and convey emotion via Zoom, email and phone the binding quality of this emotional connectivity is less, thus making it easier for someone working from home to decide to tap out.
With months to go before a return to “normal” working conditions, companies would be wise to find and implement new ways for Work From Home employees to feel more connected. It’s not merely about preventing more job departures; it’s more about ensuring corporate success. The “best friend” dynamic that Gallup has indicated leads to employee engagement has also shown to be highly correlated to financial performance well above industry averages.
Of course there is a fine line between creating an authentic culture where “best friend” relationships can develop, versus creating a false front where collegial behavior is encouraged but not rewarded in any way. My friend Sue works at a company that sent workers home at the beginning of the pandemic but switched back to live attendance in June when senior leaders felt that productivity and collaboration had diminished. To overcome a natural reluctance from employees that wanted to maintain physical distancing, the firm’s president organized a program where employees from different departments would meet in groups of three to have lunch each week to “get to know each other better”. While well-intentioned, these lunches have been met with little enthusiasm, and the reluctance of workers to sit maskless at a table with their colleagues has devolved into resentment for company leaders that are showing that employee safety is a low priority.
Millennial and Gen Z workers have a far different concern: they are finding it difficult to get connected into the workforce at any rate. Hard to believe that exactly a year ago the US unemployment rate was at an all time low (3.5%) and that there were more than a million technology related jobs that were begging to be filled. Now young professionals who graduated from college in 2017 and later are all competing with each other for precious few positions from those companies that feel confident enough about the economic outlook to post positions.
Just about everyone I talk with can’t wait to get this year over with, even though the first half of 2021 appears to be more of the same disconnectivity. The key to making the next nine months of the pandemic better than the first nine months will be to extract as much learning as possible from our real-time experiments at work and home. If our hindsight about 2020 can be 20/20, then we can all be clear-eyed about the challenges and opportunities ahead of us.
Tim Guen is President of CareerMap and blogs frequently about the challenges of career-building during the pandemic.