Social Cohesion in Work Organizations

Over the past two weeks, I found myself with faculty and administrators from multiple colleges and universities in the United States, as well as a few leaders of private sector firms. It was a wonderful opportunity to compare notes on current issues.

A common comment was that organizations have not yet stabilized post-COVID. With regard to students, they report the issues of disengagement in classes, similar to those described in earlier posts . Some colleges, especially those that are less selective than others, reported student learning losses were significant during the online experiences in high schools and colleges. This comports with recent results on reading and math scores for grade school students.

All the organizations, both universities and private sector firms, appeared to be uncertain about how their mix of in-person and teleworking is affecting productivity and staff morale. Some universities appear to be suffering with faculty who come into campus mostly only for their teaching obligations, remaining available to students only through electronic means. Staff tend to be present, but the human density in units is lower than pre-COVID. The private sector organizations seemed to vary on whether younger or older employees preferred to work in the office. All admitted that they expected to change mixes over time.

Most reported increased issues among people working together. As communities, we seem to be more impatient with the foibles of our co-workers. Sometimes, we misinterpret the intent of another and feel offended by our assumptions of their intent. We’re generating friction with one another by using electronic written communication when a more personal medium might better transmit the dialogue. There are more frequent perceived slights against one’s identity in the behavior of others. Some report colleagues struggling to acknowledge the perspective of others.

Of course, everyone was seeking to identify the causes of these changes. One line of argument forwarded in my meetings was that a cost of teleworking and online education was that we spent much more time by ourselves, alone. Spending a lot of time alone has the risk that we spend a little too much time thinking only about ourselves. The lack of face-to-face interactions gradually reduce thoughts of others’ day-to-day lives.

While zoom could have been used to repair some of this, the technology tended to be used for the “business” of teaching, learning, and administration, stripping away the informal chit-chat common to face-to-face meetings that occurs in hallways and at coffee stations. While we continued to see our colleagues and fellow students, the social cohesion built from multidimensional knowledge of them decayed over time.

It’s interesting that some have observed that many of the effects of COVID on all of us resemble those of Post-Traumatic Stress. People may report feeling “more on guard or unsafe,” large groups spark fear of exposure. More careful checking of one’s physical environment is a cognitive load that induces stress. That stress may bubble up in circumstances that have nothing to do with COVID risk.

There may be “trauma triggers” from people talking about their COVID experiences. We may have dropped activities that we used to do but are now quite safe, for example, shopping or exercising. That change of behavior may itself be stress-inducing. Some may feel an “increase in negative thoughts,” a feeling of lack of control over one’s future. We may be sleeping less soundly. All of these feelings might induce feelings of working too hard and lack of positive rewards from work or study, a forgetting of the shared mission that produces social cohesion.

Of course, there are many hypotheses but very little data.

But there were some signs of hope in my discussions. On the education front, some feel that this semester is better than last semester with regard to student engagement, that students were coming back into the flow of the university student role. Students in small seminars exhibited more engagement.

For work organizations in general, some were promoting the idea that anything that gets people together, to exercise the social interaction skills that may have become rusty, is worth the effort. In colleges, some are arguing that in-person faculty meetings are crucial to socializing new faculty members and re-establishing the bonds of existing faculty.

So the optimistic view is that we just need time together, to build up interpersonal skills that have atrophied, to be reminded of the humanity in all of us, in order to regain the sense of a common mission that bonds us together.