Happy Nice Mall

Kathryn Gregorio joined a nonprofit foundation in Arlington, Va., shortly thereafter, in April last year. epidemic forced many people to work from home. After a year and a million Zoom calls, she hadn’t met any of her colleagues except her boss—which made it easy to quit when a new job came along.

Chloe Newsom, a marketing executive in Long Beach, California, had three new jobs during the pandemic and struggled to form personal connections with coworkers, none of whom she had met. Last month, she joined a start-up with former colleagues with whom she already has face-to-face relationships.

And Eric Sun, who started working at a consulting firm last August while living in Columbus, Ohio, never met any of his colleagues in real life before leaving for a larger firm less than a year later. “I never shook their hand,” he said.

The coronavirus pandemic, now more than 17 months in, has created a new oddity in the workforce: the growing number of people starting and leaving without even having a face-to-face meeting with their colleagues. For many of these largely white-collar office workers, personal interactions were limited to video calls for the entirety of their employment.

Never being in the same conference room or booth with a coworker can seem like a dream come true for some people. But the phenomenon of job hoppers who haven’t physically met their colleagues shows how eroded emotional and personal attachments to jobs are. This contributed to an easy-going, easy-going attitude towards workplaces and created uncertainty among employers about how to retain people they barely knew.

Already, more workers quit their jobs According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than at any time during some pandemic months since monitoring began in December 2000. In April, a record 3.9 million people, or 2.8 percent of the workforce, said they threw the towel at their employers. 3.8 million people resigned in June. Many of these were mostly in-person blue-collar workers, but economists said office workers who were stuck at home also felt more free to say goodbye to jobs they didn’t like.

“It’s easier to change things emotionally if you’re in a workplace or a job where commitment is not emphasized,” said Bob Sutton, an organizational psychologist and professor at Stanford University.

While this remote work phenomenon isn’t exactly new, what’s different now is the scale of the trend. Changes in the labor market often develop slowly, but white-collar work has grown extremely quickly during the pandemic to the point where working with colleagues you’ve never met has become almost routine, said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. a non-profit think tank.

“The thing it says the most is how long it took,” he said. “Suddenly, big white-collar workers have completely changed the way they do business.”

Workplace experts said the trend for those who go about their jobs without physically interacting with their colleagues is so new that there isn’t even a label for it.

Many of the workers who did not have the opportunity to meet their colleagues face-to-face before continuing their work said they felt disconnected and questioned the purpose of their work.

Ms Gregorio, 53, who works for a nonprofit in Virginia, said she often struggles to gauge the tone of emails from people she’s never met and constantly debates whether the problems are big enough to merit Zoom calls. He said he wouldn’t miss most of his colleagues because he didn’t know anything about them.

“I know their names and that’s it,” he said.

Other work chambers repeated the feeling of isolation but said the disconnect helped them reset their relationship with the business separating their identity, social life and self-worth from their work.

Joanna Wu, who started working for accounting firm PwC last September, said her only interaction with colleagues was via video calls and she felt like they had a “hard agenda” that prevented them from socializing.

Ms. Wu, 23, said, “You know that when people’s cameras are off, their motivation is low. Everyone was clearly disinterested in seeing each other’s faces.”

Instead, she said she found solace in new hobbies, such as cooking various Chinese cuisines and inviting friends to dinner parties. He called it “double life”. He resigned in August. “I feel so free,” she said.

Martin Anquetil, 22, who started working at Google in August last year, has also never met his colleagues face-to-face. Google says it doesn’t do much to make itself feel socially connected and doesn’t have any loot or other office perks like the free food the internet company is famous for.

Mr Anquetil said he was starting to get distracted. Lunchtime video game sessions infiltrated his office hours and began buying into basketball game highlights. NBA Top Shot, a cryptocurrency market, while the clock is on. In March, he left Google to work at Dapper Labs, the startup that teamed up with the National Basketball Association to create Top Shot.

He said if someone wants to work at Google and you “pretend to dedicate 20 hours a week and put in 40 hours while doing other things, that’s fine, but I wanted more connections.”

Google declined to comment.

To help prevent more people leaving their jobs because they don’t form face-to-face connections, some employers restructuring their corporate culture and rotating new positions such as “head of remote control” to make employees work well together and feel motivated. Facebook in November remote work managerResponsible for helping the company adapt to a mostly remote workforce.

Jen Rhymer, a postdoctoral researcher on workplaces at Stanford, said other companies that quickly transitioned to remote work were not adept at fostering community over video calls.

Dr. “They can’t just say, ‘Oh, be social, go to virtual happy hour,'” Rhymer said. “This in itself will not create a culture of friendship.”

He said companies can help isolated employees stay motivated by embracing socialization rather than getting employees to take the initiative. This includes scheduling small group activities, hosting face-to-face retreats, and making time for daily conversation.

Employers who never meet their employees face-to-face are also more willing to release workers, contributing to layoffs. Sean Pressler, who joined Potsandpans.com, an e-commerce site in San Francisco last year, to make marketing videos, said he was fired without warning in November.

Mr Pressler, 35, said not meeting him physically and getting to know his bosses and colleagues made him expendable. He said that if he had built face-to-face relationships, he would have been able to get feedback on pan videos and exchange ideas with colleagues, and even feel that cuts were coming long before he was fired.

Instead, “It felt like a name in a spreadsheet. Someone you could just hit delete.”

And coworkers? “I don’t even know if they know who I am,” he said.