34 | New Scientist | 15 August 2020
“ Seeing even
just vague
acquaintances
can have a
surprisingly
big impact
on our
happiness”
There is no doubt that technology has
helped to preserve some of these essential
links amid the pandemic. “It’s not like our
social bonds have disappeared because of
covid-19,” says Parks. But a close look at the
psychological literature suggests there may
be three distinct ways that our social capital
is nevertheless leaking away.
The first is the loss of “shared experience”.
Although straightforward one-on-one
conversations may be our primary means
of maintaining a friendship, much of our
time is also spent in joint activities such as
cooking and eating, playing football or golf.
The act of doing the same things at the
same time appears to create a bond that
is independent of the words spoken.
Samuel Roberts at Liverpool John Moores
University and Robin Dunbar at the
University of Oxford, both in the UK,
followed a group of students during their
final year of school and first year of
university, and questioned them about
their feelings of emotional closeness to
different members of their social network
throughout this period. They found that the
frequency of communication – either face-to-Is this
remotely
working?
In the 1980s, advances in personal
computing and the expansion of the
internet led more and more entrepreneurs
and futurists to dream that it would soon
be commonplace for people with office
jobs to work remotely from home. By the
1990s, this seemed all but inevitable.
In 1993, management guru Peter Drucker
wrote: “It is now infinitely easier, cheaper
and faster to do what the 19th century
could not do: move information, and
with it office work, to where the people
are. The tools to do so are already here:
the telephone, two-way video, electronic
mail, the fax machine, the personal
computer, the modem, and so on.”
By 2019, however, fewer than 5 per
cent of UK employees regularly worked
from home. With the emergence of
covid-19, that is now around 45 per cent.
What took us so long? Despite
Drucker’s enthusiasm, in the early 90s,
working over a dial-up connection would
have taken an age and reliable two-way
video was still some way off. But with
fast broadband, the connectivity
required for many jobs has been
available for at least a decade,
meaning that the inertia must be
social as well as technological.
The biggest fear, reduced productivity,
has proven to be unfounded. Studies
consistently show that output increases
when workers are at home. Concerns
over team bonding may have more
substance. Remote communication
misses some of the essential elements
that lead to a deeper sense of connection
(see main story), and that could be
problematic when you are negotiating
deals or establishing a new
collaboration. The relative success of
new ways of working in the pandemic
would certainly suggest that we can get
by with less face time, however – even
if it would be unwise to scrap it entirely.
Perhaps, then, it was simply a fear of
the new, the so-called “status quo bias”,
that has held us back. Sometimes it takes
a crisis to shake us into radical change.HOLL
IE^ FER
NANDO/GET
TY
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