Zoom CEO says workers can't build trust or unite... on Zoom
Gaywallet (they/it) @ Gaywallet @beehaw.org Posts 214Comments 768Joined 3 yr. ago
Gaywallet (they/it) @ Gaywallet @beehaw.org
Posts
214
Comments
768
Joined
3 yr. ago
Reminder to be nice on our instance
A lot of free speech absolutionists always make the slippery slope argument with regards to suppressing minorities or other undesirable repression of valid speech. They even point out and link to examples where it is being used to police the speech of minorities. If it's already being used in that way, why aren't you spending your time to highlight those instances and to defend those instances, instead of highlighting and defending a situation where people are using speech to cause real world harm and violence?
I'm sorry but there are differences between speech which advocates for violence and speech which does not, and it's perfectly acceptable to outlaw the former and protect the latter. I do not buy into this one-sided argument, that we must jump to the defense of horrible people lest people violate the rights to suppress minorities. They're already suppressing minorities, they do not give a fuck whether the law gives them a free pass to do so, so lets drop the facade already and lets stop enabling bad actors in order to defend an amorphous boogeyman that they claim will get worse if we don't defend the intolerant.
You seem to be enjoying using overly complex sentences, but you don’t actually say anything worth typing.
And you seem to enjoy adding unnecessary sentences which contribute nothing but malice. This is your reminder to be nice on our instance.
taking the kleprocratic capitalism and kakistocracy as a given that can’t be challenged.
It's literally baked into the models themselves. AI will reinforce kleptocratic capitalism and kakistocracy as you so aptly put it because the very data it's trained on is a slice of the society it resembles. People on the internet share bad, racist opinions and the bots trained on this data do the same. When AI models are put in charge of systems because it's cheaper than putting humans in place, the systems themselves become entrenched in status-quo. The problem isn't so much the technology itself, but how the technology is being rolled out, driven by capitalistic incentives, and the consequences that brings.
I don't think that the punishment meets the crime. No one deserves to be treated inhumanely in prison. No matter how mislead this person is, that's a terrible outcome.
Experiencing burnout in places that you care deeply about and volunteer your time or energy towards are kinds of burnout I completely and fully understand. This very website has caused a reasonable amount of burnout in myself when I was hyper-focused on resolving all of the drama/problems I ran across and shouldering more burden than I can or should. The opening line, and this title, really capture the essence of what burnout is, in an extremely tangible and digestible way. When its a project you are doing because you want to do it, I think it's easy to burnout when the project involves others or is at scale, because you often don't have control over other individuals.
When it comes to work, however, I've never really understood why people are so tied to positive outcomes. I've only ever experienced something akin to burnout at work once, and it was more exhaustion than it was burnout. Throughout the end of 2019 and very early 2020 I discovered some blog posts and articles from the epidemiologists at the company I work for talking about how COVID was going to be the next big thing. I had some time on my hands and I decided to start structuring some data so that we'd be able to keep an eye on patients who had COVID, where they were located in our hospital, who tested positive and basic information about them, and pieces of information like this. Because of this I ended up in charge of all the COVID data in our system and ended up the chief architect of everything COVID data related which rapidly expanded to inventory and purchasing (masks, filters, vents, etc.), more expansively from lab into pathology, into additional clinical spaces and more. Because of this I ended up working 80+ hour weeks for a few months until things started to vaguely settle.
Even during this period, where I deeply cared about the outcome, my framing was not about whether the system did everything correctly, but whether I was able to offer my input and then disconnecting from the results as much as possible. I realize that I'm not an expert in everything, and when my thoughts are countered by a senior epidemiologist or clinican or operational manager, it's coming from a place of knowledge and similar concern for patient safety and quality of life. However, for the vast majority of work that I do, it's not the difference between a patient living and dying and a healthy amount of disconnect from decision making has always spared me burnout. I'm more than happy to explain to people what I think is the best route forward, and while I'm often correct in the fields of knowledge that I possess, I do not care a whole lot whether they listen to me. When things break down and need to be fixed later, I'll be around to correct the mistakes that others made in their judgement. I don't hyper-focus on that judgement because that leads both to burnout and dissatisfaction with a job.
I think the argument to disconnect a little bit more from work isn't aptly presented in this article, but then again, I am probably biased towards it because it's always been particularly helpful for me. On one final note, the author just barely touches on some amazing insight at the very end
Someone I know who’s in alcohol recovery told me, at the root of our problems is the belief that individuals can bear responsibility for personal failures caused by societal oppression.
I wish they had spent more time talking through this, because this is such wonderful insight that many seem to miss. In America we have a focus on individuality, that everyone can become president or simply pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and it's extremely harmful to everyone in society.
These are all great points and point at something which is unfortunately a difficult barrier to cross - one of culture. Older folks aren't used to doing these, and so many of them end up being resistant. They then realize that their social lives are lacking, and lament not being in the office if they don't otherwise have good social connections outside of the office. It's nice to hear that your work gave it a shot, and it sucks to hear that none of these caught on. I personally have an extremely active social life outside of work, so I've never enjoyed too much small talk or getting to know my coworkers on too deep of a level, but I definitely see many of my fellow coworkers and acquaintances struggling with this kind of problem. As I said before, I think you need to keep opening doors to see which ones work. Which doors work will vary from person to person, and as you likely have already noticed the people who start random conversations on slack are likely the same small group of individuals and it's rough to try and get people who don't normally interact to actually interact.
Hopefully something from the reply ended up being helpful to you to start thinking about the process. As an aside, here's a short list of some questions that are a little bit more personal/substantial than small talk, but are great once you've established a foothold to start to get to know someone and build some trust:
- If you were going about your normal day, how many owls would you need to see before you thought something was wrong?
- What’s one thing you’ve changed your mind about over the last year and why?
- If you could share one of your memories with anyone you wanted to, & they would get to experience it just like you did, which memory would you share?
- If you had a box full of all the lost items from throughout your life, what would be the first item you look for?
- If I were to lose all memory, what is the first thing you’d tell me about us?
- Who the most intelligent or interesting person that you've personally known?
- What’s something you hate that you wish that you loved?
More fiber is correct for nearly everyone but excessive protein intake is not really a thing, unless one is trying to raise awareness of how much meat (especially beef) Americans consume.
.75-.8g/lb is likely the upper limit for humans in terms of necessity and lower values are likely fine for most individuals. 50g/day is perhaps on the low side, but not unreasonable for a 2000kcal/day person who's not trying to gain muscle. With that being said, having more protein in the diet is almost never a bad thing (it's pretty much impossible to hit a problematic level without seriously supplementing) whereas excessive fat or carbs are much more likely to cause problems.
All of these can easily be replaced in digital environments, but you're correct that not all environments will be conducive to this. Don't see something you can immediately comment on? You can ask nearly anyone any of the following questions and get a response:
- What do you like to do to relax after work?
- Do you have any media recommendations for me? I'm looking for new content and curious what you like
- What's something you wished you never had to do at work?
In terms of direct replacements or stand ins, I'd suggest some of the following:
- Somewhere for people to showcase what normally might be on their desk or on their person- this could be an internal directory of coworkers which contains some info on each person such as hobbies or pictures of their life and family and hobbies. Or it might be a simple template that you fill out and share with management to encourage others to share. It could also be something you insert into your email signature. Feel free to be creative, humans like to socialize and while some may resist sharing this info, many will be excited to.
- Public channels of various sorts, especially random and general style channels for larger team or cross team collaboration are great ways to have conversations that you can 'drop in' on. You can also start or end meetings with open discussions about life, prompts, or ice breaker style questions to get to know your teammates and give you conversation starters.
- Sending direct messages to see who's available and wants to talk, creating office hours for people to drop in, or simply letting people know that you're available regularly and frequently are all ways to open the digital door to conversation.
I don't think it always has to be a video call, and learning how to listen and invite through multiple mediums of communication is a good skill to tap into. Humans are quite varied which unfortunately means there's no one size fits all solution here so much as there's a million doors that you can try to open and hope that at least a few will stick with the people you work with. As an aside a contact management system or notes can also help you to keep track of what people enjoy, the names of important figures in their lives, how they like to communicate, etc.
I think amongst all this is where people get lost. Nearly everyone is capable of having these conversations, not everyone recognizes all the opportunities they have to have them. For the older folks, they can't imagine having conversations like this anywhere but the water cooler, or after a meeting is over, over a lunch they invite their coworker to, or in a closed office. Younger generations, as you mentioned, grew up socializing on the internet so opening a DM, sending a text, or otherwise chatting off topic in a digital channel are all skills they already use. One might make the argument that short videos, text on images, voice chat, streaming, emoji, and other kinds of more modern communication modalities are all extensions of the same thought. If more CEOs and people in power spent time asking their workers and reaching out to people who are capable of socializing effectively online, rather than simply blaming the modality, we'd be in a much better place today. In fact, finding the companies which do this right is likely finding the companies which will be successful in the future - virtual work brings a lot of clear and unambiguous benefits, the trick will be finding out how to offset the negatives.
If you are fully virtual there’s going to be no water cooler talk
Physically, yes, unless you're attempting to recreate a water cooler in VR or something. However, I would argue that offtopic slack and teams channels and direct messages offer similar benefits. Dedicating time at the beginning of meetings to just chat, or otherwise encouraging off-topic chatting can also be a decent stand-in. This can all be enhanced by being a little bit more openly personal at work - having worker directories or homepages where people submit pieces of information about themselves or customize it to their liking can also convey the same or similar information that's shared in water cooler talk environments.
When I said they fail to account for this, it's that they aren't comparing to mediums which convey the same information in different ways. They're comparing a rich, diverse communication environment to a deprived one. These considerations are important when you're trying to make the evaluation of whether the medium is at fault or whether you've just poorly controlled additional factors.
I don’t think you can. Take for example board games as an in-person activity. The virtual replacement would be video games. A video game can do everything a board game can (with some exceptions) - but it can do so much more. So, purely from a game design perspective, video games would be much better. The main thing that video games don’t have, while board games do, is the in-person interaction. Yet, there’s plenty of people who play board games, but not video games. Clearly the in-person part is important.
This isn't a well-controlled comparison. You're comparing two vastly different things. Comparing board gaming in person to VR board gaming might get you closer to understanding what is important or higher quality about an in-person interaction versus a virtual one, but even then there's still many aspects which are tough to control for. Generally speaking most science I've read on the subject has to do with the quality of communication present. Comparing text to audio to video mediums we've found out many important differences between modalities of communication. With only text, it's difficult to fully understand what people are trying to communicate - adding an audio medium allows for a more complex message to be conveyed, which is once again improved with the addition of body language and further complexity which comes via video. The difference in complexity of message between video and in-person mediums primarily has to do with the quality of the signal and the tools permitted. The difference in how we perceive the two has a lot more to do with personal preference and complexity of the message than anything else. There are important considerations to be made here, but I have yet to see any studies which show any meaningful difference in message between the two mediums, unless we add additional complexity such as messages which involve other senses such as ones which incorporate smell or touch.
Of course meeting in person builds more trust than video-chats
I disagree with this statement. Every study I've seen trying to examine the difference between "in person" and "virtual" has been poorly designed or resulted in inconclusive results. Retrospective studies on team dynamics often fail to account for spaces critical to trust-building such as water-cooler talk and outside of work events, and fail to replicate virtual versions of predominantly in-person activities. Studies which use naive individuals and compare person to person interaction as compared to virtual are either inconclusive because they involve tasks in which trust is built in the concept of a game and how personal someone is does not matter as much as the task at hand, or do a poor job of measuring trust and are actually measuring other aspects of interpersonal relationships.
And discussions on a real whiteboard can be much more productive than on a video call, depending on the topic.
I primarily see this as a failure of digital technologies and adoption. There are wonderful digital whiteboarding apps, but they are not included in the most prominent digital meeting technologies yet and free products tend to have a poor user experience. There's also an issue of how you are measuring "productive". Scientific measurements on productivity show that whiteboarding and brainstorming are often not actually productive when you evaluate based on the quality of the end product, despite being perceived as productive. If you're measuring how people who worked on the product feel about the direction and the end result, however, there's a bit to unpack about teamwork and managing emotions.
But the particular argument this article lays out just makes no sense.
I think the point of the article is to show that the CEOs empty words are empty and to provide a framework for which one can critically examine them. You're probably overthinking the difference in meeting modality, which is a much more complicated question - in fact, I would argue that a lot of commonly bandied insights about business are based on fluff or nothing at all, but rather "gut feeling" as the article so aptly puts it.
Nestled at the end of the article is the following quote, coming from survey data
But there's also the power trip. Remarkably, a recent survey of company execs revealed that most mandated returns to the office were based on something as ironclad as "gut feeling," and that 80 percent actually regret ever making the decision.
I think the reality is that like most policy decisions at a workplace, they are based on nothing. They simply are drawn from how the people at the top feel like an organization should be or because that's simply how these decision makers are used to (or comfortable with) doing things.
It seems unfair to say that we’re saving on CO2 and methane from decomposition without also counting the cost of the biochar combustion.
Biochar is still a pretty new concept, but results are promising as a potential overall carbon negative process.
But still, it’s strange to think that this exotic bean which will only grow in certain climates can actually be easier to get than fucking sand.
There's different kinds of sand and concrete needs specific types to work well.
Yeah honestly a lot of feelings I'm dealing with right now but frustration is one of the top ones. I wish I could cry about it but that's just not in the cards right now
Not super great. I had a planned surgery this Tuesday that the anesthesiologists cancelled last minute because I had some mild symptoms they weren't comfortable with. Given that this surgery involves two surgeons and a robot it may be some time before it gets rescheduled but I'm currently left in the dark- both of the surgeons regular schedulers are off so they're trying to find someone else to figure it out and they need to use OR time for the other surgeon because the main surgeon is booked into December. I'm a bit worried it's gonna be a rather long wait but I won't know for a bit- they asked to give them until next Monday to sort out a schedule 😔
So I'm gonna need to figure out support again whenever they decide to book me, and probably will need to go back to work for an unknown period of time 🫠
Complexity or density of communication has to both with the modalities involved (auditory, visual, etc.) as well as the richness of what is conveyed (how much information is conveyed in each modality). I spend the majority of my time focused on the modalities portion of communication because it is most relevant to the discussion around communicating via different methods such as text vs phone vs video. However, you are correct to point out that how rich the communication is depends on the modality.
The most common way this shows up is an issue of hardware - if the camera you are using is of low quality or the internet connection cannot support it, the video signal is often compressed and information is lost because of this. What is available in frame versus not in frame also affects the richness. If I'm sitting in a chair and the camera can only see the upper 3rd of my body, you would be unable to see what my legs or feet are doing, which affect the richness of the signal. In addition, as you've mentioned, people act different in different situations - they may not communicate the same body language in all modalities. Human behavior itself is important when it comes to the richness of information conveyed. In fact, people often modify their behavior in response to the reduced richness of the signal! People have 'phone voices' when they are on the phone where they exaggerate or flatten their voice to counter information that is lost via transmission depending on their pitch register and other factors. A 'radio voice' is another common way in which people modify their speech over an auditory medium to enhance the signals they care most about. When communicating purely via text, people can add images and emojis, or change the very message itself to be sure important pieces of information are not missed (such as adding lol or /s to convey meaning). Even over visual mediums people find ways to change their behavior in response to the modality and may exaggerate certain movements or learn to conduct themselves in specific ways to ensure the communicated message best matches their intent.
I think it's also important to note, as you did, that these changes and differences aren't always intended and are a direct response to the medium and how we think, as well. It's not uncommon for people to be entirely uncertain where to look when using a camera to project themselves to others. People often get nervous and change how they interact when speaking in public. Observing a child who's only just learning that you can talk to people over phones or video chat exposes all kinds of idiosyncrasies of communication. People go to school to learn how to act on a stage, in front of a camera, over the radio, and through other mediums to become better communicators in mediums where richness might be affected or where they want to learn skills to better convey the same message.