46 Time April 6–13, 2020which may erode the quality of interactions, she says.
People evolved to shake hands and gather
together, even when doing so spreads disease,
Wheatley says, so there must be something beneficial
to it. They also, until recently, flew across the country
to seal business deals and shake hands, even when
technology existed to let them do that from home.
(A 2017 study published in the Harvard Business
Review found that asking for something in person
was 34 times as successful as doing so via email.)Still, with every criSiS, the calls to increase
remote work grow. It happened in 2001, when
many were afraid to leave their homes after the
Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which the Washington Post
predicted would “push telecommuting to another
level.” It happened in 2008, when spiking gas prices
made people want to skip their commutes, and an
analyst told the Los Angeles Times that Americans
“were making lasting changes in their behavior” to
avoid commuting at all. Even before the specter of
the corona virus, the Wall Street Journal predicted
that the high cost of living in coastal cities like San
Francisco and New York would prompt younger
workers to move to small cities like Boise, Idaho,
and work remotely.
Kris Hammes did that in the U.K. Hammes, now
35, was living an hour from London with his wife
and small son and spending much of the day com-
muting. He missed seeing his son grow up. So the
family moved to a city in the north of England, and
Hammes, who works in the video-game industry,
went freelance. He loves the flexibility of not having
a commute and of spending more time with his son,
but he has started to miss the in-person interactions
he had with people in the office. He’s finding himself
becoming a hermit as his social circle shrinks. Even
before the coronavirus scare made socializing nearly
impossible, Hammes says he wasn’t the kind of per-
son to go to a pub and drink with friends. Sometimes,
he’ll find himself having a long conversation with the
checkout clerk in the grocery store just to socialize
with someone besides his wife and son.
“Even the most introverted people need to talk,”
he says. “You can still do that via Slack or Discord,
but it’s not the same. Typing LOL is not the same as
actually laughing out loud.”
For people who live alone, the reality of remote
work can be far bleaker. David Mason, who lives
in Arizona, works for a video-game company in
Texas. When he gets lonely, he tries to go to the
mall or take a walk outside, but he lives alone and
sometimes feels as if he gets lost in his own world
for days. He sometimes uses Apple’s FaceTime app
to video-chat with his daughter in Pennsylvania,
but he finds that when he’s working alone, there are
few outlets for social interaction.“There are times
when I lose track of the days because I haven’ttalked to anyone and haven’t been outside,” he says.
Of course, in this time of pandemic, working from
home is a luxury that many people can’t access, and
for workers, being lonely is more appealing than
potentially getting sick. A 2016 Gallup survey
showed that about 43% of workers were remote in
some capacity, even if just for a few hours a month,
up from 39% in 2012. Holtzman says with those
kinds of numbers, it’s important to make remote
communication more feasible. She’s interested in
studying whether new forms of communication
such as GIFs, emojis and memes, which help people
express how they are feeling, can be a more effective
way of communicating than email or phone calls.
Still, even people who are on video calls all
day and feel connected start to miss the little
interactions around the office, talking about the
weather or joking about their need for coffee,
Holtzman says. “We are just inherently social
creatures,” she says. “Those little interactions are
going to enhance our feeling like we’re connected
and we belong to something bigger.” It’s something
I noticed in my visit to Spatial; when I arrived
at the San Francisco office, I made small talk
in person with Agarawala, the CEO, joking about
the commuters we could see stuck in traffic on the
nearby freeway. I’d felt as if I knew him much better
than Loewenstein, whom I met only via hologram.
Some managers are trying to make remote con-
nections as good as, if not better than, in-person
collaboration. Robert Fenton founded a company
called Qualio in 2014, in his hometown of Dublin,
and by 2016, he’d moved to San Francisco to access
venture capital. He found that as he expanded the
company, which builds compliance software for life-
sciences companies, it was easiest to hire quickly if
he didn’t require that workers be in San Francisco or
Ireland. He hired people in Colorado and in Florida,
and started to figure out how to connect employees
even if they were all remote.
Now Qualio has more than 30 employees spread
around the world. People have video calls over Zoom
every day and gossip on Slack channels about fitness
and music and other hobbies. The company uses an
app called Donut that encourages employees to have
one-on-one meetings over a virtual doughnut or cof-
fee to get to know one another. A few times a year,
Qualio uses the money it would have spent on offices
to fly every employee somewhere fun so they can
work together for a week. They’ve met up in Dublin
and Florida to socialize and work together.
People were worried at first about bonding with
people they’d never met in person, he says, but it
quickly became clear that they’d gotten to know each
other extensively online. “Every team has weekly
meetings, and we have daily huddles, and we’ve
monthly sessions and we’ve quarterly cadences,” he
says. “So everybody touches everybody every day.”CORONAVIRUS
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