Sharing the Air
What it means to be human in a more virtual world.
“All things share the same breath - the beast, the tree, the man... the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.”
- Chief Seattle
Right now, with our recently adopted Pandemic modus operandi, the idea of ‘sharing the air’ with other people might fly in the face of all logic! For the many who have the facilities to be able to conduct our work virtually, from home, I need not add to the many words written on ‘WFH’, ‘Zoom fatigue’, yada yada. Yet, when I listen to the rhetoric about a future where everyone who can, works from home almost permanently, I fear that we are factoring out all that it means to be humans at our best – with movement, variety, creativity, spontaneity, emotional intelligence, self-awareness and flow.
Basecamp founder Jason Fried, is renowned for his TED Talk, ‘Why Work doesn’t get done at Work’ and his rallying cry in his book Remote, for the work from home movement. Meanwhile, Paul Miller of Digital Workplace Group has recently published some hopeful insights in his podcast ‘Will we ever work again?’ This thinking isn’t new, as Jessica Lipnack and her research on Virtual Teams was first conducted during the noughties. All challenge assumptions that we need to be in a central workplace, to work effectively.
‘Sharing the Air’ is a phrase adapted from Japanese, meaning a person’s ability to interpret the many non-verbal signals emitted when two or more people meet in person. Whilst our contemporary video-conferencing and team tech is better than ever, we must not lose sight of our human need to share the same space with others, to interact in the natural and multi-sensory dynamics of human interaction.
Ancient wisdom and human evolution have designed us to be social creatures, in the anthropological sense. For some cultures this is still a defining element of behavioural norms today. For instance, Erin Meyer describes in her book on cross cultural dynamics, Culture Map, how high context cultures in the Eastern hemisphere rely on people being able to interact in the same physical space, to pick up all the indirect communication nuances that can only be detected when we are face to face.
As communities across the Globe grapple with how to make sharing the air, a safe and proper thing to do again, we have a golden opportunity to really challenge what will make sharing inside and outside spaces worthwhile again.
As you contemplate this for yourself, your family, your team, your customers or your organisation, here are some thought starters to test your creativity when re-building physically and psychologically safe shared work spaces of the near future.
How might we re-design the jobs people are hired to do so that they can play to their strengths? Do we really need to measure work input in hours or days of presence in a chair, or at a workstation, whether virtual or otherwise, how about we start tracking output instead? How could the Job Crafting movement build on traditional job design so that we play to emerging strengths in a team, not just carbon copy job descriptions?
How might we utilise the internal and external work-spaces to make them as appealing to be in as those we might pay to visit for leisure? What can be achieved if work ‘places’ designed for creative, problem solving interactions, rather than places to simply log on to workstations?
How might we design better ergonomics for people who need to do front-line work, physical work or caring work? This is the moment to bring in human-centred design and UX expertise into your teams, for both physical and digital workplace re-design.
How might we create more trusted interactions during the next 18 months, whilst we get to grips with how life and work needs to operate with distance, health and hygiene at the core? Really think about how often video is needed. Sometimes a good old-fashioned phone delivered with excellent deep listening skills, is far more enriching than a jerky video.
As humans we need social interaction to thrive, so keep your eyes on the horizon for a future where we do meet again, and with renewed appreciation of being able to safely share the air together.
“I could sit in my office and do videoconferences nearly anywhere in the world, but because that is so easy, people actually expect you to show up more, to make the effort and demonstrate the respect, to sit across the table and look eye-to-eye.” - Hillary Clinton