I’m Peter, 32 y/o. I work as business developer in a multinational.
I used the SENSEWIRED Workbook because the idea of false belonging resonates with my day-to-day teamwork experience. I wanted to figure out if when and how online and offline contact was better to build mutual trust and understanding with my team colleagues.
The SENSEWIRED Method helped me acquire a great deal of clarity and insights on how excessive online communication, before and during the pandemic, deteriorates my team engagement and mental health. It was quite useful to understand each other’s off and online ways to build more trustworthy and healthier relationships.
Why it matters? I realized that excessive online communication creates lots of misunderstandings, distrust and high levels of stress that affect my goals and satisfaction. For me, human connection is what makes things happen and what makes people feel fulfilled, engaged and happy working together. Taking online communication always for granted is ineffective and disengaging because we all have different off and online needs, abilities and preferences to connect.
My SENSEWIRED realistic check-up. Weirdly enough I’m a tech savvy engineer eager for face-to-face contact. At work, I’m more effective offline although I know well the benefits of texting and video. I am talented to empathize face-to-face not online. The issues arise when others always prefer texting or video. We don’t talk about our preferences openly, which suddenly becomes a big source of daily disappointment and misunderstandings among us. This quickly grows into bigger issues of inefficiency and distrust. For instance, at work I sometimes feel as being in a reality show, nothing is natural and I need to watch out because everything is recorded. This isn’t a trustworthy atmosphere and I get lots of stress for that. I feel dehumanized and exhausted by constantly interacting online. So, I refuse to lose my abilities to connect face-to-face and benefit from the value and joy that it gives me. In overall, social apps make my relationships shallower and more unreliable, making me feel lonelier more frequently.
A vicious circle. At my work the digital culture is disguised as a reliable and welfare system for human engagement. But, in reality it seeks tech-efficiency and surveillance. I work more hours, and get isolated under high levels of stress. This brings a lot of misunderstandings, inequalities and distrust in my team. The result is a big source of miscommunications, misunderstandings, frustration and inequalities. As employees, with little control to decide, we blindly accept a routine of online communication that ends up hindering trust. The digital culture is about social apps, digital community, digital courses, we forgot the human side.
Who’s to blame? In my company, as employees we don’t dare to blame technology for the lack of engagement or well-being of our team because we may be tagged as non-adaptable employees. My company management enforces a constant use of online communication and rarely questions its impact on our lack of engagement and mental health issues. Their main argument is productivity and control. Unfortunately, companies, tech developers and designers forgot that we humans have a greater power on physical contact when it’s about building deeper connection, engagement and well-being.
Different behaviors and preferences. Today we have to deal with offline and online personalities, abilities, skills and preferences to relate to each other. We claim to behave similarly off and on-line but we don’t. It’s not the same reading text than reading your body language. I learned that the more we know about each other’s online and offline preferences the better we connect.
Invisible effects. I uncovered multiple frequent misunderstandings that frustrate me to create a deeper connection with my team, especially these days when mostly everything happens online. Eventually, an ongoing online contact makes me feel lonely and sad. In my opinion this is the wrong future of work.
Learning from my own stories helped me rethink my needs and what I wanted to change from my off and online team interaction. I figured out that finding an agreement on why, when and how to interact with each other on particular situations make a big difference in our relationships and mental health.
In my case I seek to bring back human control into my work by encouraging a better understanding of each other’s skills, needs and preferences to communicate off and online
My challenge in my team is to intentionally value, maintain and support the offline human touch that brings warmth and joy. Also to support the flexibility given by online contact in specific situations.
The results. I gained confidence to get my team involved in a conversation about creating mutual understanding on why, how and when to communicate off and on-line. We discussed the positive and negative sides of the social apps we use to define which ones were optimal for us. We considered our off and online interpersonal skills, needs, goals and preferences. And magically, we connected deeply using handwriting and sharing our experiences through real life conversations. We then could trace a personal and team roadmap to follow and support our goals and evolve together.
What I valued the most was the unique, easy and mindful approach to today’s human relationships: creating harmony between our choices of freedom and belonging using both offline and online abilities to connect. SENSEWIRED brings back the value of human connection at work.