Not entirely convinced. The tradeoff is in-office you need to sit next to someone. Remote you can talk to anyone in the world. But it is the role of good WFH culture to avoid siloing of people.
TBH, I've been on teams where the chat was a constant stream of activity. It works really well and involves a lot of people that might not be involved in decisions otherwise.
I've also seen the room be quiet way too much on some teams. This is always bad, but hard to fix.
The worst is when the team chat rooms are quiet because each member is in several private rooms or group-chat conversations doing the actual work in there.
Regardless of the reasoning, it's toxic to WFH/remote work, even in the short-term. And it's outright sabotage in the long run when it's time for someone who wasn't invited to the "correct" chats to onboard a new hire who ends up needing some context that exists only in someone else's private chat.
In my very limited experience this happens when managers (above team leads) insist on being present in chat rooms. No offense to any manager in this topic, I know that you mean no harm in 99.9% of cases and that you do want to make things better, but honestly your presence creates a chiller effect. Jokes are no go, because who knows, maybe this one will be interpreted badly. Local questions are no go, because you can't ask them during work time (he's slacking!), you can't ask anything which can even remotely be treated as improper. Can't show that you lack knowledge in things which should be obvious, can't banter about colleagues or about work in non-positive way. And the list goes on. We have a chat with 100 people which started as a meme and joke one, a lot of people were posting funny stuff there. Now the last meme picture posted there in mid october, and the second to last was in august. And the only people posting there at all, even sirius stuff, are the 3-4 teamleads very close to the management. Same shit in the chat of immigrants, we have a quite a few semi-permanent relocants on the projects, but manager is not one of them and is still present in that chat room. No one posts there, everyone talks either behind the scenes (because there are a lot of questions for people in new country) or in the independent big chats outside of the company.
And again, it's not like our managers are bad, quite the contrary, they are very good professionally and personally. And we don't have layoffs. But people still won't talk in the presence of even mid level management, it's an instinct of sorts I guess :) .
PS: this is only about informal optional chats. All work chats are never hidden or avoided. We divide them by program, Slack for work and Telegram for fluff.
We actually have a "watercooler" channel that specifically doesn't include manager people. It's where all the non-work stuff gets posted and it seems to work out pretty well.
Do we work at the same company? Don't forget the constant stream of meetings where noone takes meaningful notes, and everything just gets stored in a context-free diagram, or someone's head.
It looks like literal sabotage in the long run. Of course, the ones that have the info in their head are more valuable in such a system.
In a past life the room all the programmers was in was quiet as a library. Anything above a whisper seemed like yelling. It was terrible for collaboration and communication. We ended up going for walks in order to talk about stuff, which actually helped in multiple ways. Walking seems to stimulate the brain in weird ways and talking freely was very productive.
That said, I would not trade WFH for anything. Those walking times with co-workers was great but it's not worth being forced to go into an office every day.
I've not heard of any research that shows that it's impossible to have meaningful conversations on these platforms.
And please note the distinction between "it is impossible to have such conversations" and "some people (especially less tech-savvy people) have a harder time having such conversations" on these platforms.
Teams/Slack/Discord/etc is just another communication medium. Once our society has, collectively, had more of a chance to get used to them, and once we're no longer dealing with an entire generation who were bad managers before the personal computer even existed (</hyperbole>), I wager you'll see a lot less complaining about the medium itself.
OK: all three of those are specifically about "Zoom fatigue".
None of them in any way address the issue at hand, which is the ability to engage in meaningful conversations over online platforms such as Teams and Slack.
> Except you don’t actually talk (as in have a real conversation) with anyone on Teams.
That is the specific argument that I am refuting: that your experience of not being able to "have a real conversation" on Teams, etc, is universal, rather than just being your experience, which cannot be extrapolated from without gathering significant extra data.
"People get Zoom fatigue from having too many video meetings (especially in the first 2 years of regularly using video meetings after never using them before)" is not the same thing, and does not prove that these technologies are impossible to use as a replacement for in-person meetings on a wide scale.
Did you read the papers? That is literally not what they are saying.
If I have one twinkie, that isn’t a problem - because I have other ‘real food’ to compensate. Same with someone doing zoom periodically.
If all I have is twinkies, that is a real problem, because I don’t have enough real food to compensate. I’m missing some essential vitamins, minerals, and macros that will eventually hurt me a lot. Plus a lot of sugar that causes a lot of load in my body we really don’t handle well.
‘Zoom fatigue’ is exactly because people aren’t having enough real in-person interactions anymore and it’s causing numerous real psychological issues in people because of it.
Because there are actual necessary things in real in person interactions that are not present in video conferencing. And real effects of doing video conferencing our minds don’t handle well.
The insistence on ‘but it’s not impossible!’ is tangential to the fact that it isn’t a good idea to do long term or exclusively.
And depending on the individuals environment or makeup, it could be an immediate major problem, or it could be a slow burn. Everyone will have a different tipping point.
I’m sure there are some 1-in-a-million outliers out there that could stay pretty functional literally eating just twinkies for a decade (somehow).
But either way, having the social interaction equivalent of an all-Twinkie diet is a bad idea.
Near as we can tell.
But ‘this is America!’, with an ongoing obesity crisis, so not like I expect people to just listen.
