This year, with most of the attendees traveling, we conferenced on Zoom. Everyone took turns reminiscing about favorite memories of Helen.
When talking with the nonagenarians and centenarians in my family, I've found that they are especially pleased when we mention moments that everyone, maybe even they, had forgotten. These moments are concrete evidence that they will be remembered after they're gone, proof that their lives had meaning.
The job market has been heating up for new graduates, which means that there's a new generation that needs to learn the norms of workplace behavior.
These norms, or rules, are a bit different--and some subjects didn't even exist--when your humble blogger entered the work force back in the (cough) '70's. For example:
Note preferred modes of communication. On the first day, ask: What’s the best way to get in touch? Email? Call? Slack? (Don’t text your bosses unless they text you first.) “Every manager is going to have a different preference, and simply asking signals that you are eager to contribute,” [Harvard career adviser Gorick] Ng said.
There does seem to be one common predilection among managers, which Mr. Ng calls “bundle and escalate.” Don’t ask 10 questions in 10 separate communiqués—batch them together before approaching your manager...
Virtual-Meeting Virtuoso
Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Webex and Bluejeans are some of the more widely used videoconferencing platforms. Find out which is deployed by your company and download the apps for your desktop and mobile device in advance, then try a test meeting, before you have to join a real one...
You’ll want to make sure you look and sound great. A little height for your webcam and light on your face goes a long way. Logitech’s $60 Litra Glow clip-on light produces soft, flattering illumination, but any lamp or nearby window helps...
Email Like a Pro
Overly long emails are a common new-grad pitfall, according to Renate Norman, general manager of global university recruiting at Microsoft. “Get to the point quickly,” she said. She recommends starting with a summary and your main point or request up top. You can add more detail later, but if it’s getting too messy, pick up the phone.
Many of these recommendations are simply updates to old standards. For example, managers have always preferred that subordinates "get to the point quickly" in meetings or memos; now we're applying that rule to other modes of communications, i.e. e-mails and videos. Another: personal phone calls were frowned upon during working hours; now we're expanding that rule to include text messages and e-mails.
In my humble opinion the new rules can be figured out from general principles: keep your personal and business lives separate; respect the privacy of others; look presentable; waste as little of other's time as possible; be prepared on the topic and technology before the meeting; and be polite even if you have negative emotions toward another person.
While you’ve been Zooming and Slacking, more colleagues than you might think have been coupling. A third of workers said they were, or have been, involved with a colleague when the Society for Human Resource Management conducted a survey in January—up from roughly a quarter in early 2020...
Office romance was on the wane when the pandemic struck, rendered obsolete by the popularity of digital matchmaking and cautionary tales from the #MeToo movement. Going remote would finish the job, we assumed.
Instead, two years of relative isolation, the very thing that could have ended dating among co-workers, appears to be reviving it.
The possibility of sexual harassment and the after-effects of a breakup seem less important in the age of COVID:
Many HR departments say relationships among colleagues aren’t top concerns at the moment, given worker safety issues and staffing shortages.
“Does it make the list of things that I’m worried about? No,” says Fran Katsoudas, who heads human resources at Cisco Systems Inc. , where she’s an executive vice president.
COVID-19 has shifted everyone's priorities.
Life goes faster than you used to think, and if you see someone--even on Zoom--who might be the right person, you'd better seize the moment.
This is the second Father's Day without my father.
Linguistics professor and best-selling author Deborah Tannen shares advice about how to discover more about a father's life after he has passed away.
Many people go through their parents’ things when they die, and they find documents, notes, letters, memorabilia. If you’re interested, don’t pass up that opportunity.
Talk to people who knew him, such as a friend or sibling. Ask what he was like when he was young. You could also read about the place and time your father grew up in. Many fathers have been through wars or historical events.
And talk to your own siblings, to get their views of him. A father who has more than one child will be a different father to each of them.
My mother, brothers, and I have done more communicating in the last two years than in the past 20. There's usually an administrative or medical issue to discuss, but sometimes people just want to see each other over FaceTime or Zoom. Often there's a story about Dad that is new to the rest of us. We chuckle, and the recollections comfort.
Working from home didn't require special accommodations initially, but we're entering month 10 of shelter-in-place. If this is indeed the new normal, employees and employers are trying to figure out how to adapt to WFH for the long haul.
Those at home are often plunking down in broken chairs, using desks that are too shallow or even experiencing foot pain from walking around barefoot. Or worse, they’re just not getting up at all.
“We need to get people moving,” says Brian McEnaney, an ergonomist at Sunnyvale, Calif.-based NetApp, whose 10,000 employees are set to work remotely until at least July. Before the pandemic, Mr. McEnaney’s team received requests for help from about 10 workers a week. That’s ballooned to more than 100. The technology company has rolled out online classes on recovery breaks—short midwork stretching sessions that focus on gentle motions and deep breathing—as well as “ergonomic open office hours,” where employees can drop in with questions and concerns.
Mr. McEnaney says you don’t need to get fancy to correct many problems. Simple hacks, like sitting on a pillow to raise your body, can help. He also implores workers to avoid rounding their spines and pushing their necks out, an injury-prone position he calls the Office Turtle. Back at the actual office, he used to employ a 6-foot cutout of a turtle to get his message across.
Your humble semi-retired blogger spends an average of four hours a day on the laptop: personal finance, charity work, writing, continuing professional education, and purposeless web-surfing--not necessarily in that order--comprise the vast bulk of the activity.
I do have desks and tables, but moving from the couch would be an admission that life has turned serious again. And it's really not that serious, not until the orthopedist tells me that I look like a turtle.
In what may be the most important news of the past week--and that's saying something--the stock market averages increased sharply this morning after the announcement that a vaccine with greater than 90% effectiveness has been developed and that it could be distributed as early as this month.
A vaccine developed by Pfizer Inc. PFE +11.87% and partner BioNTech SE proved better than expected at protecting people from Covid-19 in a pivotal study, a milestone in the hunt for shots that can stop the global pandemic.
The vaccine proved to be more than 90% effective in the first 94 subjects who were infected by the new coronavirus and developed at least one symptom, the companies said Monday.
As of 10 a.m. EST the indexes are up 8% over the past week. The travel and leisure cohort, especially the airlines, are seeing 20% pops. Meanwhile, the stay-at-home winners (Zoom, Netflix) fell back this morning.
Some commentators (WSJ, Yahoo News) also attribute today's bounce to the consensus forming around a Biden victory. IMHO, that's only a small factor because the recounts and legal battles have another month to go. While Mr. Biden is likely to prevail, some reports of fraud from cities in battleground states do seem worthy of investigation, so we'll wait and see.
Videoconferencing has been used in business since the 1990's, but widespread consumer adaptation had been waiting for a catalyst. In March, 2020 it arrived with a vengeance.
Home WiFi + easy-to-use software + multiple devices + low cost/free + coronavirus = the Zoom explosion.
The WSJ asks if consumer videoconferencing will permanently alter our methods of interacting.
You’d be hard-pressed to name another technology that’s been so quickly and blindly adopted as Zoom. Television took years. Social media grew in fits and starts (some of you will remember Friendster). But in the past few weeks, I’ve been invited to Zoom work meetings, happy hours, poker games and Easter brunches. I have weekly Saturday-morning coffees with my buddy Joe who’s isolating a few blocks from me in Brooklyn. Friends have attended Zoom weddings and seders, court proceedings and dance parties. “SNL” even recorded its latest episode on the now-ubiquitous platform, with host Tom Hanks performing the monologue from his (surprisingly unglamorous) kitchen.
This pandemic too shall pass, but the professionally prescient are already debating what parts of this novel lifestyle will continue when it does. “We’re developing new habits and new comfort and new solace in these behaviors,” said Matt Klein, director of strategy for Sparks & Honey, a consultancy that studies trends. “But when we’re increasing the repetition of these things, over time, they’re going to become more normalized.”
Those of us who pressed the flesh for decades will go back to in-person meetings with eagerness. But the post-COVID19 generation probably won't. An historical example is e-mail, which didn't eliminate letter-writing for those who grew up writing letters. Four decades later, the texting-with-emojis cohort can barely compose an email, much less a real printed letter.
I have to put in an admiring word about Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), whose science fiction I read avidly in my youth. Sentient robots with vast powers are no longer thought to be impossible, and his three laws of robotics (1942) now are the starting point for discussion of intelligent-machine ethics. What Isaac Asimov wrestled with nearly 80 years ago is relevant today.
Another of the writer's creations, albeit minor, was the planet of Solaria (The Naked Sun - 1957), which was one of many Earth colonies that had lost touch with the home world in the Asimovian future history of the galaxy. Solaria is relevant today because it was a world of extreme social distancing. From a 2011 research paper: [bold added]
Solaria was a planet inhabited by Spacer descendants. The 50th and last Spacer world settled, it had perhaps the most eccentric culture of all of them. Originally, there were about 20,000 people living alone in vast estates. Solarians’ lives were marked by technology: citizens never had to meet, save for sexual contact for reproductive purposes. All other contact was accomplished by sophisticated holographic viewing systems, with most Solarians exhibiting a strong phobia towards actual contact, or even being in the same room as another human. All work was done by robots: there were indeed thousands of robots for every Solarian. As centuries went by, Solaria became even more rigidly and obsessively isolationist...
Solaria is a fictional planet in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Robot series. The author draws on this metaphor to warn against the risks of dehumanization that may be brought about by an excessive and indiscriminate technical progress. In the 1950s, Asimov’s novel well embodied the common fear according to which technology would have progressively destroyed social interaction. Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, our lives are marked by technology almost as those of Solarians. The widespread diffusion of the broadband, the internet revolution, and the true explosion of online networks like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter is worrying social scientists, who fear the risk of growing relational poverty.
Isaac Asimov had it right. In the name of health and safety authorities are justifying all sorts of actions that would have seemed extreme a few months ago. Let's hope that lifting the "temporary" rules will be as quick and easy as imposing them.
But it's not all Zoom and gloom. We can enjoy the creative ways in which Zoom is being used to stimulate and entertain us in our bunkers.
