After a year of living through a pandemic that’s upended how we interact with the world around us, it’s safe to say that many of our personal and professional relationships have changed.
In the absence of being able to see coworkers in person, let alone just about anyone outside your household, workforce connection consultant Lakshmi Rengarajan predicted we’d pick up a newfound appreciation of our office mates.
“For a long time, we’ve probably taken for granted the ability to see our coworkers every day and maybe didn’t realize how valuable that was,” Rengarajan told CNBC Make It in April 2020. “I think teams will be a lot closer when they’re able to move back into the workplace.”
But after a year of endless Zoom happy hours, not to mention a heightened sense of stress in our personal lives on top of working through a global pandemic, Rengarajan thinks our relationships with ourselves, our coworkers and our employers have permanently shifted — for the better.
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When she thinks back to April of 2020, Rengarajan says she was already concerned about screen fatigue, “that the Zoom happy hour was a copy and paste of what we were doing in the office and putting it in a virtual setting, and that was not going to work. But I think people to had to experience that for it to become clear.”
She fielded calls from clients who said they were having problems feeling engaged with others, but also that they didn’t have any solutions other than scheduling more one-on-one meetings, virtual happy hours or team-building events like group cooking classes.
