One way I’ve kept sane over Covid is by revisiting pleasant conversations from my past. I have a good auditory memory, and at the end of the day, if I’ve had a memorable conversation, I replay it in my head until it’s been stored for later use.
Then, on a day I need to feel pretty, I remember your compliments. If I feel undesired, I recall a bit of pleading from old boyfriends. And through the last few years, when I’ve felt lonely and disconnected, I thimk about the strangers I turned into friends.
It’s like I have my own version of Netflix with categories like, “Because you feel neglected, we think you might like these conversations where people listened to you babble on recklessly for over an hour.”
(Don’t worry, by the way. I’m not repeating any conversations here. Frankly, I don’t know how accurate any of them are anymore. It’s possible I’ve skewed them in my favor with each reiteration. Some of them make me sound impossibly clever and kind, so I’m not sure what is real and what is augmentation.)
But, just as it is with re-runs, at some point they get stale and you need new content. I need to have some more conversations so I don’t just play the classics on a loop. But how, though? Much of what I recall are facial expressions and — oddly — which direction I faced for each sentence. You have to be in person for those memories.
I might need to be in person a bit at work. Then again, if I show up for just a day, that will be the day everyone talks about nothing but Taylor Swift or office politics. I don’t know what to do.
13 responses to “Conversations”
… could you propose an outdoor happy hour-ish thing after work, on a day you have to go in to work to have meetings anyway, to have better odds of conversations?
Still might be Taylor Swift or office politics, though. But you might be able to bring up other topics if you have them in hand…
KC – Mmm, happy hours didn’t lend themselves to the level of intimacy I like, which I admit is wayyyyyy too intimate.
One-on-one time with each co-worker in sequence, first testing out the staring-into-each-other’s eyes in silence as an anthropological experiment? Or interviewing them each NPR or StoryCorps style, maybe, for a personal history project… In other words, I have no idea, good luck. 🙂
(you’re right, though; happy hour conversations tend to be frothy, it’s later-at-night parties that tend to have the less-socially-normal stuff, but you can’t exactly invite your co-workers to a Vintage Themed Sleepover. If you get trapped with them in the building due to a random blizzard or something, maybe…)
KC – one on one lunch conversations can get pretty deep. I might try to set some of those up … but so often someone else tags along. And I am essentially shy.
Now wondering whether you could sell A Day Of Interview to the company as a morale/insights/corporate history thing [.. pick one, though, not all three], where you get an hour one-on-one, sequentially, with a bunch of employees, and everyone gets paid for it…
(“insights” would probably require also covering a few specific questions, but because only asking the Corporate Consultation Questions doesn’t actually get accurate/correct/true answers to them, most of the time, you would need to talk with them about random other things so they are not in Answer An Official Survey Tick The Box mode and are in more of their creative brain.)
(… and don’t call it for morale if the company absolutely knows what to do for morale and isn’t doing it. But if there isn’t something glaringly obvious like “pay people enough to live on” or “have enough staff that people aren’t getting absolutely flattened and burnt out” or “if your company posts record profits, maybe *don’t* cancel the annual bonus that year” or “… have you considered not yelling at them all the time?” then being recognized as a whole person by a company can be really good for morale! and talking about not-the-normal-stuff with someone hilarious you already know is probably cheaper than bringing in a masseuse to the office, but can be a good mini-vacation…)
KC – when there are re-orgs or department mergers there is a lot of effort spent getting people to know each other. It would be interesting to see if effort goes in to getting people to catch up with each other.
But, I’m certain that they wouldn’t include off-site people in that, because they want to encourage on site attendance.
Did you hear some companies are saying you have to be on-site to get any hope of a promotion? Luckily that isn’t a concern for me at this late stage.
I could see only swapping people into *manager* roles if they can be on-site at least part of the time, for some manager positions, since some people do work better under a manager who is physically present (and others don’t need that at all, though), but regular promotions should deeeefinitely not require being on-site, but should instead be “how well are you doing the work” and for promotions that involve additional tasks/responsibilities, “how well could you do those additional things” most of which do not require being on-site to do.
But. Companies want people on-site, except a lot of companies have cut their office space so people have to do hotdesking instead of there actually being space for everyone and… it’s not good. Like, *either* you cut your office space and only have people come in, in small groups, occasionally for meetings, such that no one has to put in a full day at a desk that is not set up for them (or you let everyone do WFH all the time!), *or* you give everyone a desk and require them (or those who have desk spaces) to come in either sometimes or always. But hotdesking really cuts down on productivity and mental health to an enormous degree, and I have no idea why some companies think it’s a good way to go? (except that then you have the bottom-line improvement due to less office space rented and you technically meet the putative ideal of having people “in person”… except for how much of their day is trashed due to having to set up and take down every single day and having nothing ergonomically set up [for tall people or short people especially] and having continually changing distractions and the panoply of tech problems caused by hotdesking and starting every day with the instability of sorting out with which desks are already taken and having no mini-and-then-expanding-circles community because it’s all transient, etc.)
KC – we did “hot-desking” that for a year or so before covid, and I never noticed any extra time spent adjusting the seats. I did notice we almost immediately established a quiet area and a chatty area. I only remember one time I had to sigh loudly and pointedly move when the chatties invaded our space.
Hooray for successfully establishing a quiet area vs. a chatty area! Friends who are working in hotdesk setups have reported a lack of success in finding any place where people aren’t loudly in online meetings, etc. (but some people are better at filtering out noise while working than others, so it makes sense that some people wouldn’t see the value in having some reduced-noise areas). I think nobody’s mentioned chattiness being a problem – there’s more of a “…nobody knows each other” thing going on generally, but chattiness/not may be partly an introvert vs. extrovert vs. some of both industry/company thing? Not sure.
And that is interesting re: seats; maybe the majority of the employees you work with are close enough in height? (or maybe people were just having bad posture; that is what I used to usually do when using a temporary desk, and… it catches up with you, eventually.)
KC – It just got to be a habit: adjust seat, check if mouse is left or right handed, and for people sitting after me, change the screen resolution.
I’m really glad it went that smoothly! Most hotdeskers I know are pretty miserable about it, and my stint of semi-hotdesking was also pretty unpleasant.
*Although* that was a “we’re assigning you someone else’s space day-by-day because we don’t have a place to put you” situation, which also has the “I’m invading someone else’s cube, don’t touch *anything* they might be bothered by” awkwardness layered on top. Plus I am a spider and don’t fit very well in other peoples’ desk setups (the monitor should be higher or there should be a lower keyboard drawer, because I have ludicrously long arms and otherwise my typing position is rapidly problematic *or* if I keep the chair high enough so my arms are at a good angle to the desk, I’m curled over like the hunchback of Notre Dame to see the screen.
But also, I know a lot of people in fairly tech-heavy environments and their individual setups to improve comfort and efficiency (in an extremely typing-heavy profession with a lot of symbol-typing) are not easily applied every. single. day. and some people are made fairly uncomfortable by not knowing where they’ll be sitting each day (more so for the “sometimes there aren’t actually enough desks” people, but also I know some people on the spectrum who work best when there isn’t unnecessary change to adapt to).
It’s really good to know it’s not terrible for everyone, though! That makes it less baffling for companies to be doing (although: companies should still be keeping an eye on whether all their workers are okay with hotdesking or not, because *whew* there are a lot of unhappy hotdeskers out there, and losing a chunk of time and mental energy each day to the setup aspect is probably not very good for the bottom line, fundamentally, although probably the real estate aspect is more expensive than the lost work capability?)
KC – I think our team was so enchanted by the modern airy look of the new offices that we didn’t mind sharing. We were only there a year and a half before Covid, though.
… aha, yes. Whether hotdesking in a space is an *upgrade* to what you previously had would indeed strongly affect the perceptions (along with personality type and level of desk/computer customization needed).