The Kennedy Perspective – Eurescom GmbH

Absence makes the team forget

Challenges of home working

David Kennedy
Eurescom

We have been in various stages of lockdown for over a year now and it has fundamentally changed the way we interact for both work and social interactions. Many praise this as a liberalisation of the work-life balance, but I’m not so sure. I believe that we may be losing something of great value that cannot easily be replaced by an audio conference.

The benefits of home working

When we discuss the benefits of home working, we seem to always assemble a list of personal points that appear to favour the individuals’ perspective. These generally include: time management flexibility; no office interruptions/distractions; ability to self-organise the home office; better environment for conference calls; no commuting, and more time with family.

Inherent in these is the permission we give ourselves to intersperse the work with many home actions: do the laundry, walk the dog, get the shopping while everyone else is at work. Now I am not saying these are bad things, but it actually dilutes the home – work boundary in a way which may actually be counterproductive.

Then you find that people start to use personal issues as the reason they should work from home – I am expecting a delivery, I have to keep an eye on my mother, etc., – and while this in itself should not affect productivity, the logic that we don’t go to the office because we have a lot of personal things to organise is threatening to the focus our work should have for the equivalent of a working day.

The challenges of home working

The biggest challenge of home working is ensuring the work gets appropriate focus in the life vs. work balance discussion. Home is by nature designed about our own comfort, entertainment and enjoyment. We have fitted our homes out to give us the life comforts we want and to support all out personal interests. This means the challenges we face when working from home are: time management; home interruptions/distractions; increased risks of misunderstandings due to the limitations of emails; long response times between colleagues due to individual schedules; boredom, taking naps, too much tv/music in the background; and less time with colleagues.

Some of the advantages are the biggest challenges as well. The most damaging aspect is that we are much more restricted in our expressions when using emails, messages and video links than when we meet person to person.

The top issue home-office workers find problems with is “disconnecting” from work. Without the clear-cut change of location and defined office hours, many people have difficulties clearly dividing their personal and professional time. Our use of the one platform, e.g., emails for both work and private communications means that our social connections keep popping up while we are working.

© AdobeStock

The office perspective

From the perspective of the relationship between the individual and the company certain vital concerns arise. The absence of regular person-to-person communication can be a challenge for some people. The biggest issue is to do with the value assessment of the contributions the individuals are making in their absence from the office. This is reflected in the concern of many home workers that their professional efforts wouldn’t be fully appreciated as they were not in the office and their colleagues wouldn’t automatically see what they are doing.

If we try to list the concerns from the company perspective, we can see that many of the intangible aspects of the beneficial work environment are challenged: keeping the team spirit; maintaining the company culture; understanding and sharing the company policies; team members underworking or overworking in the home environment; and team members feeling lonely or left out.

And this can be compounded by the difficulty of having tough talks about performance or participation issues over the video link. It is much more intimidating to try and bring up difficult personnel issues over the phone than by speaking directly to each other.

A simple example of the challenge we face today is the question if it is acceptable that audio conferences are interrupted by children running in or by the dog attacking the postman. I’ve just been in an international conference where the speaker was interrupted by his very young daughter and, while it was not anything to complain about, it did distract him from his presentation to several hundred people. How should we view this – acceptable in the new world or unprofessional?

Conclusion

I have to be honest here and admit that I have not used the home-office option myself, as I need the physical delineation between the home and the office to put me in the right mindset for work. Yes, I do answer emails in the evening and other things, but then I know that I am not at work and can keep it in context.

The biggest challenge I feel is the loss of the casual team interactions over coffee. I have always managed to get a lot of updates, give help on immediate issues and generally get a feel for how my colleagues were managing the work and the, hopefully short-term, overloads. Home working occasionally does not damage this, but prolonged absence due to the COVID situation has precipitated means that you have learned to do without this dialogue – and that is not good for anyone.

Critical thinking in the age of fake news

David Kennedy
Eurescom

It is concerning me when I see people that I considered sensible sharing unfounded and even false information through social media. The truth has become a flexible commodity today, and seemingly sensible people are proposing “alternative facts” as the truth, mainly because they are too lazy to find the truth.

Intelligent people like Carl Sagan saw this coming. In May 1996 he said: “We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces.”

The scope of the problem

In his 1985 novel “Contact” Sagan posed the thought that: “In the long run, the aggressive civilizations destroy themselves, almost always.“ This is raising the question, if our trend for egocentric, nationalistic and xenophobic politics is setting our civilisation on the way to destruction or not.

When we consider that we, as technologists, have opened Pandora’s Box, which allowed deep data analysis tools to capture our data, identify our susceptibilities and fears, and then let unscrupulous politicians manipulate us through subliminal and false messages, we have to consider how we can regain control.

Today I don’t need to even consider your fact-based arguments, if I simply brand them as fake news. The ability of large groups of people to be happy in the knowledge that the Earth is flat is maintained through an amazing ability to deny all physical proof to the contrary. This is done by designating it as proof that the establishment is behind a conspiracy to keep the truth hidden.

Similarly, when the Brexit team declared that “the people in this country have had enough of experts”, they were indicating a key part of today’s problem – the desire to replace knowledge with opinion based on hearsay, fears and in some cases paranoia. The same logic asserts that my ignorance is as valid an opinion as your educated position. This has been combined with a hyper-sensitive sense of political correctness – where media is expected to give fair representation to all viewpoints – to actually distort the meaningful debate and collective decisions that democracy depends on. If you ask a scientist to be on a TV programme debating cosmic science with a Flat-Earth believer, you are actually demeaning science by asking it to prove itself against fiction. This approach gives the uneducated views an undeserved status.

How to fix our new world

We really need to go back to basics. The most basic thing is education. We have had global campaigns since World War II to increase the education standards across the globe. We may need to expand our concept of education beyond simply teaching people to read and write, which is only giving them the tools. We rather need to make sure people stay long enough in education to learn how to be critical in their thinking. The link between education and involvement in the civic society has been well identified – why this is linked is not so obvious. Some say the teaching ingrains the benefits of political participation while others propose that schools and collages teach us to work, play and communicate together for common gain.

Student communities have long been seen as the political vanguard and not willing to accept suppression. Even Lenin complained in his time that students were unwilling to subject themselves to the leadership of the revolutionary – and not so democratic – elites.

But even here we run into a modern interpretation of critical thinking, which basically says: don’t trust anything the government tells you, as they are lying to promote their own agendas. Science asks you to be critical and work through any hypothesis until you have evidence to prove or disprove it. We should renew our global commitment to education to the point where the average person has the capabilities to deal with modern challenges.

When we can stop asking people, if they believe in climate change and instead debate with them, if they understand the implications of climate change, we may be making progress.

What to do now

I would like us all to think about our roles in the chain: are we helping society or are we part of the problem? Your behaviour on social media has a lot to do with this. If you simply share emotive news that you like the sound of and because it re-enforces your biases, then you are the problem. I challenge you to change you behaviour with three steps: 1. Consider the message; 2. Consider the source; and 3. Pause before sharing.

I may be naïve, as we have worked hard to make our social communications powerful and far-reaching – and somehow almost anonymous. But the click-without-consequences world we live in is actually not without consequences. We need to put the values back into our increasing communications, in order to avoid that we sow so much suspicion and mistrust that our civilisation, as we know it, is doomed.

Digital anxiety

The new malady of the digital age

David Kennedy
Director of Eurescom
kennedy(at)eurescom.eu

While we know it is unproductive to spend long periods on-line, we can now observe the new stress, digital anxiety, which can appear when we’re disconnected. Digital anxiety is usually arising out of our own inability to manage our connected lives. Actually digital anxiety can have many forms, and the different forms can also combine in many ways to have quite a negative impact on our lives. I do not want to give the impression that everything about the digital era is negative but, as with most things in life, overdoing it can be harmful to us.

What is digital anxiety?

There are some obvious digital crisis situations that most people can identify with: who has not felt the moment of panic, when you cannot locate your phone while you are travelling? Suddenly your plane ticket, your hotel booking and even your ability to contact anyone are at risk. This stress can also happen on a smaller scale, when your phone tells you that you have only 5{b28ae05319d94bff0b4d65c5a9f4524dd588360f05c61ef440e1608e0a1c4144} battery left, and you have no means to charge it.

Probably the biggest impact the connected world has on us is the way we have become interrupt-driven. We react to messages, emails and calls, as if they are the most important thing in our lives at that moment. If we are honest, 99{b28ae05319d94bff0b4d65c5a9f4524dd588360f05c61ef440e1608e0a1c4144} of them do not need an immediate answer, but we feel compelled to react immediately – even in the evening when we should be sleeping.

This is part of what is called the “fear of missing out” – we stay connected, because we don’t want to be the one who does not know what is happening in our social group. The good aspects of connectivity, like being able to contact the family anytime, should not be overlooked, but we have achieved a good balance.

A particular evil in the digital era is the ability of social media to prey on our insecurities by making us always aware of social comparisons. We post pictures of our holidays, and even our breakfasts, not really knowing if we are doing it to share our experience with our friends, or just to make them jealous. And we are definitely at risk of spending too much time recording our experiences, at the expense of enjoying them in the moment.

The ultimate level of this is where some deem themselves to be “social influencers” on the basis that so many people are looking at their posts that other people should pay them to promote goods or services just because they are popular. We should avoid adopting these populists as role models as they add no value – better form your own opinions. It depresses me that the current generation of populist politicians have learned to trigger such emotional responses via social media without providing any substance or value. This is something we must learn to overcome.

The other aspect of the connected digital era that needs management is the work-life balance. It is easy today to keep answering emails in the evening and not give yourself the few hours to relax from the stresses of work. Some people maintain that it is easier to answer the mails in the evening without interruption, but that brings us back to the starting point that we are allowing ourselves to be interrupt-driven.

Anxiety in other aspects of life

Anxiety in itself is a natural response where the body, when faced with a threat, releases a rush of adrenalin into your system, which uses these anxious reactions to launch the “fight-or-flight” response. This is hard-wired in us from prehistoric times, when we needed to react to the risk of attack by wild animals. It was not just a healthy response, it was necessary to stay alive.

Today these responses can become a problem when we feel under continuous range anxiety to complete work tasks for a specific deadline, solve family or money problems, or any issue that causes tension and demands your attention to the point where the adrenalin kicks in but you don’t actually need to fight or flee.

Managing our digital lives

As we strive for greater connectivity capacity and “always-on” services, we need to ensure that the good aspects are enhanced and the less helpful ones are controlled. We need to set our devices so that, for example, social media posts and messages do not give us a notification for every message. Then we can choose the time and energy to invest in seeing our messages when it suits us. Time management is critical in all things, just as you set time to exercise, have dinner, etc., you can set a time for reading emails and switch them off for a few hours when you have something important to do.

Having said that, my technical support people have just told me that they need to disconnect me from the mail server for about 6 hours to update the mail server – I am already beginning to feel insecure about such a long disconnection, and it has not even happened yet. Maybe I need to investigate my own relationship with the digital connected world.

Do you control what you own

In the early days of the internet our expectations were limited – even Tim Berners-Lee considered his invention of the World Wide Web as just something “to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups”. Since the international fear of COVID-19 has taken effect, we expect the internet to be the saving grace for humanity. In fact our dependency on our online connectivity is such that in 2016 the UN declared, in a non-binding resolution, that “the same rights people have offline must also be protected online”. But now that we really need it, are we ready to move our lives online?