a Zoom meeting—we love to check our devices, whether we're in the bedroom or at our desks. That becomes a serious problem when it hurts our ability to do the complex work of communicating with our colleagues.
Remember the dinner story at the beginning of this chapter? Let's think about the work version now. Recall a typical one-on-one conversation from your working life. How often is the conversation interrupted by you or your co-worker checking a device?
Willys worked with a senior executive who scrolled on his phone throughout conversations with his direct reports, and even with people who'd just received offers to join the company. There are few better ways to imply that you couldn't care less about the person you're talking to. The leader who doesn't diligently avoid distractions will, however unknowingly and with whatever generous intentions, sacrifice strong team relationships for the illusory thrills of a smartphone. That's a recipe for compromised performance in the short term and an isolating lack of meaningful relationships over time.
However you feel about talking to someone who can't be bothered to put down their phone and look you in the eye, this kind of distraction-addled talk is simply less effective than focused conversation. Information is lost, and so are potential relationships. In the early years of the iPhone, the late Stanford communications professor Dr. Cliff Nass pioneered research on the psychological effects of multitasking. He began with the hypothesis that people who did lots of things at once—like switching between browsing Facebook, scrolling through Instagram, scanning the news, and writing a research paper, all with music streaming in the background—became good at doing lots of things. Like most activities, those who practiced regularly would build skill. His research, however, convincingly pointed in the opposite direction:
The people we talk with continually said, “Look, when I really have to concentrate, I turn off everything and I am laser-focused.” And unfortunately, they've developed habits of mind that make it impossible for them to be laser-focused. They're suckers for irrelevancy. They just can't keep on task.
This phenomenon wasn't fleeting, either:
Our brains have to be retrained to multitask and our brains, if we do it all the time—brains are remarkably plastic, remarkably adaptable. We train our brains to a new way of thinking. And then when we try to revert our brains back, our brains are plastic but they're not elastic. They don't just snap back into shape.9
Nass wasn't sure whether this frenetic, lack-of-focus effect was permanent or just a sticky flavor of temporary. He did find that the self-proclaimed multitaskers weren't really multitaskers at all: they were just constantly distracted people, and they never did anything with full concentration. Much of Nass's research came before 2010. Constant distraction as a sociological phenomenon has skyrocketed since, with more powerful devices, more hypercolorful screens, and more years of fully funded attention engineering.
Distracted people are a fixture of the modern workplace, but the structure of work itself has also changed dramatically over the past generation. The kinds of work that exist, the skills that fetch the highest pay (or any at all), and the physical environment of the average workplace all look very different than they did even in the early 2000s.
Many of the changes to professional life are clearly positive, and that's partially thanks to a slate of creative, productive, and diverse new jobs. The artist who creates in geographic obscurity until they find a niche following online didn't exist until very recently. The same goes for people in economically ravaged places: the decentralization of work and the democratization of creative tools have exponentially increased the number of people who can develop and display their talents. Any forward-thinking firm can now make a tempting offer to a skilled person in a faraway area: work for us and stay right where you are. Keep your home and lifestyle, and collect the high compensation that we'd pay to a similar candidate who lives in a much more expensive city. Just make sure that you have a fast and reliable internet connection, and enjoy the benefits of remote work.
But pandemic lockdowns showed us that the liberation of remote work also makes everyday sociality much more difficult. Early in the pandemic, the health journalist Jamie Ducharme talked to people frustrated by how inadequate video chats felt:
Jessica Pflugrath, a 27-year-old freelance writer and editor who lives alone in Brooklyn, New York, has been relying on video chats to stay connected with her friends, but she says they bring a nagging feeling of unease. The ebb and flow of an in-person conversation doesn't always translate to video, and she doesn't like the pressure of having to be “on” all the time; she also doesn't like how easily digital conversations lend themselves to distraction. “There's a lack of feeling present with people, in general,” she says.10
That's not surprising. For thousands of years, our species evolved around close interaction with each other. Our ancestors studied each other's body language, tone, and energy to understand their social standing and the subtle cultural information that was necessary for everyday survival.
The richness of an in-person interaction depends on the innumerable factors we perceive from our companion's cadences, facial movements, posture, smell, touch, and proximity. This is true throughout the animal kingdom, in fact: as we learn more about both ourselves and our relatives in nature, we begin to build a more vibrant picture of the myriad methods animals have for understanding each other.11
When we communicate in ways that don't capture these subtle, nonverbal inputs, we lose a lot of what our brains want to know about others. We lose the stuff of great poetry and salient memories—the way your dad wrinkled his face right before telling a joke, the little tap on the shoulder an important teacher would always give after a job well done—and we lose a treasure trove of subconsciously processed, vital information about the behavior and beliefs of others. All of these tiny pieces of information gradually form attachment to another living being. These are the fundamental bits that become a relationship.
If we want to create a world where people can work remotely, be productive, and enjoy flourishing social lives, we need to find ways to translate these little details to physically distributed work. Mindlessly scheduling video calls won't cut it. Clever leaders can make it work, and the pandemic inspired widespread experimentation with remote relationship-building. We have to recognize the value of relationships, engage with other people, and continuously find new ways to care about each other in a culture that increasingly commodifies and isolates us.
After all, bad actors can co-opt the immense promise of flexible work. Remote and gig work can be a shortcut for the callous boss who wants to get a job done quickly, cheaply, and without any other considerations. Outsourcing tasks to anonymous remote workers can cut costs by taking advantage of different regional expectations about pay or the value of a particular skill. You can get those pesky few lines of code taken care of by an unmet freelancer who lives … well, it doesn't matter where, does it? Get it done, pay next to nothing for it, and move along. Remote work, in other words, can be even more exploitative than traditional employment.
Managers have had the chance to make some version of this cold, short-term choice for decades, but it's never been as easy or anonymous. As Dr. Alexandrea J. Ravenelle found in her study of the gig economy, this dynamic can be particularly troubling for women who are paid to do gig work in the homes of strangers. Without a network of co-workers, “most gig workers are independent contractors who need good reviews from the client and who don't have access to an open-door human resources department or colleagues they can complain to.”12 As more and more workers make their living in roles that require rapid changes and flexible teams, we have fewer and fewer structures to promote meaningful, long-term relationships with the people we work with.
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