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All Those Zoom Meetings At Work Aren’t Making Me Feel “Connected”
“We need to talk about connectivity”, my manager said during a video-conference team meeting about a year ago. “Yes”, I responded, “the network connection is really unreliable and IT support needs to be a lot more accessible”.
But she wasn’t talking about tech issues. She was talking about staff members connecting with each other. Since then, connectivity has become a buzzword denoting some kind of social glue that binds people in the era of COVID-19 workplace arrangements.
I grappled with this strange new concept and realised that it meant something quite different to my idea of connecting with colleagues.
It meant setting up a regime of workplace video-conferencing meetings: section meetings, team meetings and one-on-one “catch ups” with managers. Add to this any number of impromptu video calls managers would make to a staff member whenever the whim took them. This was on top of the timetable of meetings I had for various committees and working groups.
It didn’t felt like connectivity. It felt like surveillance. It was a level of monitoring we would never have been subjected to in the office where it was quite common for me to be left alone for a whole…
