Some years ago Tanouye Roshi, a Zen master of great wisdom and foresight, gave a talk on the digitization of music. Turntables and tapes were beginning to give way to CD’s and he was saying analog and digital music simply weren’t the same. Digitized sound lops off the highs and lows and approximates everything in between. Likewise recorded analog music is not as rich as a live performance. But he could see the wave of things to come—digital music was becoming more cost effective and convenient—and his point wasn’t that digital was bad, only that we needed to have the sensitivity to know the difference. The digital experience is thinner than analog, and much thinner than full-scale life.
After more than a year of porting so many human interactions into digital format, Tanouye’s warning seems more prescient than ever. While our social lives are regaining their in-person footing as we emerge from lockdown, for many of us, our work interactions are forever changed by the pandemic. Most organizations are allowing or even requiring more remote working. Most people who can work remotely say they prefer it several days a week. Even when people who can work remotely do come into an office, most of their meetings are online. Just as with digital music, the cost and convenience of digital human interactions will almost certainly make it a wave of the future. Yet, a challenge in the thinning out of human interactions is that it can put us in our heads, relying almost entirely on digital visual and audio processing with its dropout and delays. If we want to build greater resonance in our online connections, conversations, and meetings, we do well to find ways to bring the breath and body back in.
Necessitated by the pandemic, increased remote working and online meetings brought benefits to people and their organizations that neither will happily part with. According to Global Workplace Analytics, if those who could work remotely (around 60% of the U.S. workforce) did so half the time, the collective savings would be over $700 billion. Even though individuals tended to work longer during the pandemic (48 minutes per day according to a Harvard study), they saved up to several weeks in reduced travel and commuting time. While they attended more online meetings, those meetings tended to be shorter, with a net savings of meeting time.
Moreover, the increased flexibility and reduced cost of remote working did not come at the expense of productivity for most companies. In a McKinsey survey of executives, more than 90% reported that individual and team productivity did not sag due to remote working. The vast majority (80-90%) of employees and CEOs agree that remote or hybrid forms of working should be the post-pandemic norm. Add to this the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from working and meeting virtually and the bar for justifying the in-person alternative is higher still.
That said, “Zoom fatigue” is real, and there are good reasons for it. In order to feel a sense of safety and trust with another person, our two nervous systems undergo a subtle dance that’s called co-regulation, where they literally build resonance together or “get on the same wavelength.” Many of the cues we use for doing that—eye movements, subtle gestures, the field around a person, rate of breathing, smell, warmth, subtleties of voice—are part of what’s dropped out or changed in the online environment. Eye contact is missing, most of the body is out of sight, and video and audio delays can add a halting, disorienting quality to even one-on-one conversations. Add more people in smaller squares and the data available for co-regulation and its attendant feelings of safety are further reduced. When we don’t feel safe, our social engagement system, which is the part of our parasympathetic nervous system that puts us at ease with people, doesn’t function well, making it harder to listen, remember or think clearly.
That’s not to say online meetings are necessarily doomed or work relationships weaker. Indeed, companies where productivity remained strong throughout the pandemic were characterized by connections between people remaining strong. Organizations like Chosei Zen, which opened a virtual dojo during the pandemic and continues to host daily meditation online, found relationships strengthened and many described it as a lifeline. As leadership programs, summits, conferences and meetings of all kinds moved online, many people experienced an increase in intimacy as we were invited into one another’s homes—kids, pets and all. Emotional barriers and work formalities came down as people were more real with one another. When people do feel safe online, they tend to be more authentic and self-disclosing.
So, the irony of digital meetings is that they have the potential to pump a wider range of interpersonal energy through an even thinner channel where it can be harder to co-regulate or feel at ease. And when people don’t feel at ease, those meetings are suboptimal, if not a waste. As such, we do well to revisit our online meeting behaviors for how we can both tune into the richness of what others are offering and widen the channel so more will come through. We can do that by paying attention with intention and introducing as much opportunity for co-regulation as possible.
To pay attention with intention is to recognize that the limits of our senses limit the veracity of what we sense from others and the inner maps we make of them. As the online channel gives us less data, we’re more prone to error in how we connect the dots or jump to conclusions. We mitigate this risk by slowing down, listening deeply, and asking questions that test some of our provisional assumptions (e.g., “Seems like this time has been heavy. How are you doing?” or “What’s at the heart of this for you?”). Asking sincere questions and listening deeply is like tuning our radio dial to pick up the strongest signal. The very effort to do so opens our senses and admits more through our filters.
To bring back more ways to get on the same wavelength (i.e., co-regulate), we do well to engage the breath and body. The rate of breathing, for example, is a fundamental frequency that entrains other frequencies in the body-mind system and can be entrained within a group. This is undoubtedly one reason why online meditation (where breath gets synchronized) can bring a group together so strongly. Making the exhale several times longer than the inhale further stimulates the social engagement system, settling us down and putting us at ease with one another. An effective practice is to open a meeting with a grounding exercise where everyone stands up and does three deep, slow breaths, with each exhale dropping down through their body and feet and into the earth. Another practice is to have everyone count aloud several long, slow exhales, say 1-to-5. One person in the group is unmuted to keep the group synchronized, but everyone counts along with them. In the space of a few breaths, the group comes together in a new way.
Other practices to foster co-regulation might involve the group moving together. For example, if a meeting is feeling low energy, take a stand-up break, and rock side-to-side in the same rhythm, or send a wave-y pulse through the group by “holding hands” across windows on the screen. We often open our Zen Leadership programs with an adaptation of the tea ceremony used in Zen training where everyone takes 3 sips from a cup, moving as one. We also do simple movements, such as an overhead strike, timed with an exhale to bring body, breath and group together. By prompting people to pay attention to the rhythm or movement of the group, they become more attuned to one another. People start listening differently, as if they’re picking up the beat of a song. This is the quality of attention needed to foster trust and caring across a channel as thin as a Zoom screen.
Just as the cost and convenience of digital music made it inevitable, so the cost and convenience of digital meetings make them here to stay. As Tanouye Roshi might say, there’s nothing necessarily bad about the thinner medium as long as you know it’s thinner and don’t lose your sensitivity to the human beings on the other end. Otherwise, life itself starts getting as thin as a screen.
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July 02, 2021 at 10:46PM
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What Meeting On A Screen Leaves Out And How To Bring It Back - Forbes
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