TECHNOLOGY
It’s time to start leaving our Zoom cameras off
There’s a strong case to go cameras-off during Zoom meetings. But bringing the bosses around is another matter
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IT’S PROBABLY A common experience for many of us: you're on a group Zoom call, maybe not looking or feeling your best (or maybe you can't control what's in your background), and you simply click off the camera and continue participating in audio-only mode. Simple enough, right? The platform enables this feature, and many people love it.
Everyone except bosses, that is: a new study from American software company Vytopa found that 92 per cent of executives dislike the feature, and believe their employees are “less engaged” and “probably don’t have a long-term future at their company.”
That puts them at odds with workers, who are increasingly exasperated with on-camera meetings and find that audio-only calls work just as well as phone calls used to. “The more other people sit stone-faced, the more I turn into a clown, trying to wheedle just a little bit of encouraging energy back from them,” wrote Torie Bosch, inveighing against this on-camera obsession. “But a phone call? The thing that used to make me want to tear my hair our has become a little blissful.”
There are good reasons why managers should consider softening up on it. Several studies in 2021 show that remote workers were less stressed and more productive when working remotely ― and adding the stress of cameras tends to counteract that.
Plus, all the energy required to run all those cameras is taxing on computers (audio-only Zoom calls tend to run way smoother and suffer fewer drops) and is a huge energy drain: an audio-only web call reduces the carbon footprint of the call by a whopping 96 per cent ― pretty significant, considering internet traffic accounts for about four per cent of global emissions. It's good for the planet, and your employees will like it, too.
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WORKPLACE
Friends with (intergenerational) benefits
There are good reasons to expand your network of friends at work by adding a few people who are older or younger
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WE HAVE HEARD so much about the differences in work style and expectations between millennials, gen Z, boomers, gen X and so on. A lot of it seems to assume that these workers exist, if not on completely different planets, then at least on different sides of the building. The assumption is that as different generations work side by side, conflict is bound to ensue. But what about the positives?
There’s growing evidence and sentiment that intergenerational friendships are a major bonus for the workplace. Though it can be hard to quantify whether it has financial impacts, it can certainly ease tension and improve workplace culture to have young and old working side-by-side. And it’s not just about mentorship, either ― genuine friendships across generational lines can have big impacts on the workplace.
“If you’re older, then it’s valuable to understand the experience of people who are closer to the front lines of the work being done,” writes Art Markman. “If you’re younger, then getting a view of what it’s like to be in a more advanced role can be really eye-opening.”
For workplaces that want to improve this, there’s a few things they can do. Creating opportunities to connect is a big one, whether that’s one-on-ones or getting people together around shared interests. But also, it can be important to make sure these aren’t just work friendships, which can quickly take on a mentor-mentee dynamic, and let them transcend the workplace. “A younger person can help combat some of the loneliness and isolation that older people feel,” says one expert. “This younger friend probably has more energy and zest for life.”
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WORKING REMOTE
WTF is asynchronous work?
A move to a better way of working remotely is needed, and operating asynchronously might be the solution
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ANYONE WHO HAS gone freelance or started their own business will probably extoll the benefits of asynchronous work, where the people you’re working with (or for) might be in different time zones, and where work is generally structured around deliverables and deadlines, not “work hours.”
And with hybrid work taking over, more people are able to experiment with working asynchronously ― although that’s not without consequences, good and bad.
The shift to remote work did little to help work-life balance, even with commute times cut out of the equation; people ended up working longer, and less efficiently. In response, many jurisdictions have looked at right-to-disconnect laws, protecting workers who want to protect their non-work time. But that's a band-aid solution to some.
“A move to a better way of working remotely is desperately needed,” writes Steve Glaveski in HBR. “We can help remote workers get on top of their workloads and mitigate work-life balance conflicts by moving away from hyper-responsiveness and real-time communication toward greater asynchronous communication ― the type that truly gives people the freedom to decide when and where to work.”
Even if you aren’t in a fully asynchronous workplace, there are some ways you can leverage the benefits of spending less time waiting on communications. A big one is email ― it’s already semi-asynchronous, but one piece of advice is to schedule your email habits. If you have non-time sensitive messages to send, consider scheduling them to go out at the same time.
More radically, consider only checking your email at specific intervals. (There even used to be an email app, Tempo, that worked just like this; it shut down in late 2021, though. Perhaps the world was just not ready.)
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TRENDS
The name game
When it comes to surnames for children, some couples are buckling all the standard alternatives and trying something completely different
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THOUGH THE TREND lines rise and fall on this, in the modern marriage it is growing far more common for women to keep their maiden names rather than adopt their husband's surname. The hassle, the patriarchal baggage, the fees ― all of it can be a headache.
But if that couple then decides to have kids (or, if they were never married to begin with), another question crops up: whose last name does the child get?
Rather than haggle over who takes whose name, more couples are taking the third way: creating a new last name. For some, that means a hyphenated last name, but other are taking it a step further and creating a new word altogether. Highlighted in the New York Times, married couple Nate and Kelsey adopted the last name “Johnold” ― a portmanteau of Dippold and Johnson. In Toronto, one couple dubbed themselves the Miraculas (which they said fit their spooky, Halloween personalities). For couples who chose to keep their own names in marriage, children are sometimes the recipients of new last names, created whole-cloth.
“The idea that one person with one name, and another person with another name, come together to jointly create a new one ... symbolically, it can be very powerful,” said one gender and family studies professor. That can be even more significant for same-sex or queer couples, too, who might be keen to buck heteronormative expectations.
“What about two dads? Two mums? Donors? Surrogates?” asked behavioural scientist, Matt Wallaert. “People have been figuring how to deal with this on their own terms, and as that continues, new cultural norms will emerge.”
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