Consider this: Whether sitting in an office alone or waiting in line for a Broadway show while standing among hundreds of others on a buzzing New York City byway, the glowing panel can drag even the most social person into cyber-oblivion. A sense of separateness grows no matter the situation. Accumulating are experiences with pixels instead of people and a society made up of isolates among isolates. The cause, however, is not the machine itself, as many are led to believe. No, the culprit is virtual distance, helped along by mediating machines.
Virtual distance involves psychological and cognitive alterations arising from on-going and mostly uninterrupted electronic chatter. As a result, the mind focuses only on what’s reflected in the glow. Associations with other human beings are forgotten and the one-to-one relationship with the device is the only connection seen or felt. When this happens among many dozens, hundreds, or thousands of employees, social well-being within the company fractures.
Social well-being is critical to organizational success. Job satisfaction and employee engagement are inherently linked to social happiness. There’s nothing new here. According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, group belonging and meaningful social interactions are fundamental to good performance. And yet many companies don’t realize the extent to which mechanical conversations delete people’s ability to form deep relationships.
Many focus only on physical separation as the culprit causing social detachment. But that idea leads managers down the wrong path. Detachment from others comes in many forms and is not just a physical phenomenon. Cognitive function also corrodes.
On a day-to-day basis, email is the most common way employees interact. But in any interaction, whether it’s face-to-face or virtual, human beings need a lot of information to distill meaning from a conversation. In the presence of another, it’s not only a person’s expression that’s used to interpret messages; it’s the context in which they say something—like where they are, what else is going on around them, and the kind of intonation heard. These elements are invisible yet powerful components of a civil discussion.
In other words, we use multiple inputs even when we are standing right next to each other. So it doesn’t make sense to expect productive relationships to develop when electronic communication is what employees rely on most. When those dominate there’s no context in which to frame the words on the screen, so we might as well be deaf and blind.
Virtual distance builds in all organizations where computer-mediated communication is prevalent. Social well-being suffers, and performance degrades. The next three posts of this series will offer solutions to overcome virtual distance and restore social well-being in the workforce.
