Building Social Ties without Physical Co-Presence
In which we discuss how social ties are fundamental to team work and how the geographical disruption of knowledge work accelerated by the pandemic could be turned into a benefit.
One of the things I naturally tend to do is to seek and/or reinforce lateral social ties across the organizations I belong to. I use lateral here to mean “not following the established/legible power/authority structure”. This is not a “f**k the hierarchy, I know better” kind of posture (although, in all fairness, that’s probably where it started), but it is the result of awareness that reporting hierarchies are merely spanning trees (trellises if you consider dotted line reporting) of the real underlying social structures. These hierarchical ties are designed to support execution and predictability but they often hinder the kind of organic collaboration that is fertile to innovation and non-linear thinking. I feel everybody somehow perceives this but few do anything about it beyond trying to periodically restructure the hierarchies.
My belief is that meaningful collaboration happens along these social ties.
Unfortunately, by construction, not all of those can be paved effectively via explicit reporting relationships. In fact, I believe that the power imbalance between managers and reports is mildly toxic to the very key ingredients that allows trust to form. Great managers are those that get the job done maintaining positivity and effectiveness sustainably. Outstanding managers are those that do all that and manage to create social ties with their reports that persist when the reporting relationship changes.
The material I use to build social ties is trust. Unfortunately, almost everything in our life up to this point taught us to build trust while physically co-present. Can we build trust without physical co-presence? It feels impossible. It feels like breathing without air.
Remember those “online pandemic cocktail hours on Zoom” and how dystopian and vacuous they felt? In my mind, these represent the archetypical lack of awareness of what really goes on during relationship building that is not grounded in physical co-presence. Reminds me of early TV ads which were effectively radio ads coupled with good looking women pointing at products and logos. Took decades to understand how to use the new audio/visual medium to its full potential. They early ads look so weird to us now that they look like parodies.
Efforts such as Google’s Starline aim to improve on the current state of affairs by tricking the brain into feeling the co-presence even when it’s not really there. It’s still liquid breathing, but with lighter liquids. Although technically inspiring, I feel it’s a poor research direction if one wants to make a large scale impact (how long till when we can have that tech on every computer? enough bandwidth? low enough latency? can it even work for groups?). I’m interested in something else: understand how it is even possible to build long-lasting social structures even in the absence of co-presence. I feel that only after we gain awareness of what goes on there, we can hope to learn how to build support structures and make social bonding easier to happen even without the need for physical co-presence.
I believe that when we meet somebody online for the first time we do not really see them as humans but we see them as embodied representations of our own expectation of them. A meat puppet, so to speak. I don’t fully know why, but this appear to happen dramatically less when physically co-present.
Imagine me walking into a physical meeting with somebody I have never met and know nothing about other than their job/role. Now imagine me realizing this is the same person I flipped off earlier while in my car and were rushing to be on time for this very meeting.
What emotions do you feel simulating that encounter in your heads right now? Guilt? Shame? Regret? I can’t imagine it would be a positive feeling.
How would you feel in the same situation if I were meeting them on video conference (VC) instead? I’m willing to bet it wouldn’t feel as negative as before. Most likely, it feels it would be easier to bias our judgement of that person with our previous driving interaction. This is because both “car” and “VC” act as “dehumanization” distortion filters. The other human in the other car is not really perceived as person because it is effectively clad in literally tons of steel armor. They are more likely to be perceived as an obstacle than a potential member of our tribe. But once they are in front of us, shaking our hand, it feels like things are different. Different parts of our brains appear to engage and our frontal cortex is often so secondary that we often aren’t even able to remember their names. Have you ever forgotten the name of a person that introduced themselves in real life? Now, have you ever forgotten the name of somebody that introduced themselves over VC? Why is that?!
Imagine going to a party to meet new people but everybody must wear hazmat suits, would you go? Would you appreciate the challenge or would you hate the very notion? Now imagine everybody has to wear venetian carnival masks instead. Do you feel the same about the situation? Can you tell why? Can you tell how universal those feeling are? What if they were N95 masks instead?
If we want to build long-lasting social bonds, we must find ways to offset the dehumanization distortion of digital communications and show our own humanity to the other person, and bring ourselves to perceive theirs. But this is hard, even conceptually. It feels impossible, like trying to flirt with somebody windshields.
One way I find myself doing this is by leaning hard on honesty, candor and vulnerability. I give the other person a sense of who I am by giving them information they can potentially use against me. It has to come from a place of candor and honesty and it must really be something that opens yourself up to the risk of being hurt. This effectively “super-humanizes” and offsets the dehumanization distortion, it forces the other to “feel me” and to engage more emphatic and social parts of their brains (which are triggered naturally when meeting in person).
Would a man you have never met clad in a medieval armor elicit empathy in you? What if he was crying? A crying person in a car would make us feel bad for flipping them off without the need for us to shed our wheeled armors. These dehumanization distortions are real but they are not very powerful, we can overcome them once we recognize they are there. This is something very few understand and those who do appear to have social bonding superpowers.
Another thing that people generally fail to do is to care about the digital communication loss explicitly, for example gaze: most everybody looks at the other person on VC in their eyes, but very few actually make sure the other person perceives this. The trick is simple: move the VC window and make it smaller so that it’s closer to the where the camera is because, newsflash, the pixels depicting their eyes are NOT the sensors perceiving your face. The closets the depiction of their eyes is to the sensors reading your face, the more they will perceive that you care about them as humans, not just as participants in the communication.
There are tons of subliminal and non-verbal signals we receive during physically co-present communication. Computer-mediated communication is extremely lossy on that front, but what’s worse is that we’re generally not aware of what is actually being lost, why that matters and what kind of agency we have to offset such loss.
The pandemic has opened the pandoras box of geographically distributed work and every knowledge worker out there will have to learn how to approach “hybrid work” and generally be more tolerant and flexible with geographical distribution of their teams. We collectively need to step up our game to understand what is being lost during digitally-mediated communication, how we can offset that loss and even how we can benefit from this spatial diversity and make sure we don’t end up creating a cast system of proximal strong social bonds and dispersed weak ones.
I believe it is possible to do so (and my own career suggests there is a lot of benefit in doing so) but we need to consider it as a talent acquisition and retention superpower rather than yet another pandemic-induced nuisance.