INNTEL Recovery Purple Paper

inntel.co.uk There are challenges in store. Working remotely under lockdown is likely to have had a significant impact. You will need to overcome problems including loss of team spirit and stress. Team spirit is likely to have been undermined because employees have been working from home in silos. They have been doing things their own way, working more to their own timetables and having to be more independent. Stress levels may have increased because employees may have struggled to fill gaps when colleagues are ill or have feared that they may lose their jobs. Research published in the Lancet has highlighted the psychological impact of quarantine, finding that self-isolation can lead to post-traumatic stress, anxiety, depression and anger. The work was led by Professor Susan Michie, director of the Centre for Behaviour Change at University College London and a government advisor 1 . Other research suggests the experience of coronavirus may lead to employees becoming less creative, less forgiving of colleagues and less willing to compromise. “Due to some deeply evolved responses to disease, fears of contagion lead us to become more conformist and tribalistic, and less accepting of eccentricity. Our moral judgements become harsher and our social attitudes more conservative” says David Robson, author of The Intelligence Trap on the psychology of faulty reasoning 2 . There is evidence that, even though there may be more home-working in the future, there is real benefit in a return to face-to- face meetings when it is safe to do so. Take “Zoom fatigue”. Video-calling such as Zoom, Skype and FaceTime can be extremely hard on the brain, scientists say. “There’s a lot of research that shows we actually really struggle with this,” says Andrew Franklin, assistant professor of cyberpsychology at Norfolk State University in the U.S.. In face-to-face conversations, the brain gets valuable information from non-verbal clues such as whether someone is fidgeting while you talk or if they lean forward ready to interrupt. This lays the groundwork for better communication. Virtual meetings with multiple participants, on the other hand, force the brain to decode so many people at once that no one comes through meaningfully. So group video chats actually become less collaborative 3 . 1 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ mar/13/behavioural-scientists-form-new-front-in- battle-against-coronavirus 2 https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200401- covid-19-how-fear-of-coronavirus-is-changing- our-psychology 3 https://www.nationalgeographic.com/ science/2020/04/coronavirus-zoom-fatigue-is- taxing-the-brain-here-is-why-that-happens/