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What We’re Missing in the Hybrid Workplace
As the pandemic has worked its dreary, disastrous way with us over the past couple of years, the talk in communication circles has been about the new hybrid nature of the workplace. Meaning, of course, that we can now handle a mix of in-person and virtual interactions, from one day to the next, and even within one meeting or conference to the next. Eight hours of back-to-back Zooms with people in many different countries and time zones? It’s something you can do, if you need to — or want to.
And that’s a good thing, on the whole. We humans have been making the world smaller for centuries, as we’ve speeded up communications, from bonfires on hilltops, to the Pony Express, to flight. After that, came email and then the Internet, and we started to realize that instant communications around the globe was a thing.
In many ways, widespread use of virtual communications is less of a development than email or the mobile phone, because we already could communicate virtually. It’s just that it happened at top speed, and to a large swathe of the working world, in March 2020.
But how is the hybrid world actually working? I’ve been talking to various executives, conference organizers, and scientists in the past couple of months in order to see how we humans are adapting to the virtual hybrid world. The answers surprised me, as we…
