In January, Stephanie Creary, an assistant professor of management
at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, was leading a workshop
about diversity, equity, and inclusion practices in front of a remote audience
of academic surgeons.
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Their work environment, she observed, would usually be a
fairly formal one; still, she beamed into the doctors’ homes while sitting in
her living room in Philadelphia, with a vase of flowers on a table in the
background, a painting of a wine bottle and glass on one wall.
“It felt like, ‘If we are going to talk about this topic we
never talk about, we should break all the rules,’” said Creary, who focuses on
issues of identity and diversity in the workplace. “I think people felt more
comfortable receiving it because it took the formality down.”
Throughout the past year, many of our personal spaces have
similarly pulled additional duty as offices, schools, gyms, even psychiatrist’s
offices or music studios.
“We’ve all had a front-row seat to people’s homes and their
living rooms,” Creary said. And at the same time, many of us have had to click
into different roles (professional, parent, student) from the same space.
Naturally, the boundaries blurred: Kids careened into the Zoom frame during
meetings; workout clothes doubled as office attire.
We are now beginning to make our way back into the public
sphere, and although social media platforms and videoconferencing apps will
continue to feature in how people log on for work and leisure, such a shift may
be prompting you to consider: Is it time to reassess and create new boundaries
for our online and offline selves? Here are a few ideas.
Bring more of your private self to work
Before the pandemic, casual personal conversations may have
been a feature of your workplace relationships — but you probably did not have
quite the transparency and community with co-workers that developed from
frequent video calls from home. Simply having a window into other people’s home
environments may have deepened your connections.
“Traditionally, there’s been a pretty large division between
the personal and the professional,” said Adam Smiley Poswolsky, an author and
speaker who focuses on relationships in the workplace. “I think one legacy of
the pandemic is that’s just no longer acceptable for the vast majority of
workers.”
If you found the shift to be a positive, try replicating
elements of it more intentionally when you see people in person. Poswolsky
suggested setting aside time at the beginning of in-person meetings to have the
kinds of personal conversations that might result from observing an intimate
detail (what kind of tea are you drinking? is that a relative passing through?)
in the corner of your camera frame.
Throughout some of the darkest months of the pandemic,
Corinna Nicolaou, a college personal-essay writing instructor in Pullman, Washington,
almost never saw her students’ faces — they rarely turned their cameras on in
class.
“I felt like students were reacting in some ways to that
forced sense of intimacy,” she said. “There was a weariness, I felt, to the
online thing.”
Nevertheless, she switched on her own camera for each class,
allowing her students to see her in a more relaxed setting. She sometimes
appeared in comfortable clothes, or even in bed. It introduced a new
vulnerability and ease to their relationship that, she thinks, set an example
for her students: They, too, could open up, at least in their writing.
“The essays that I got out of students this semester were
really revealing and very deep,” she said.
She hopes she can now take those lessons back into a
physical classroom.
“Over these last semesters, teachers have had to be
flexible, be vulnerable, not have all the answers,” Nicolaou said. “Once you’ve
been through that, you’ve changed.”
Consider your comfort levels
Some people have preferred not to put their private lives on
screens.
“This sense of being exposed has been a challenge for people
who do not have an environment that they feel comfortable showing to whoever is
on the other side of the line,” said Munmun De Choudhury, an associate
professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology who studies health and
well-being online.
Students from disadvantaged backgrounds who don’t have
dedicated workspaces, she said, might not want to share with classmates.
As an actor in New York, Anna Suzuki has fielded a fair
number of video calls for work this past year: discussions with directors,
table reads for television series and so many other Zoom meetings. She also
shares a studio apartment with her partner.
“Because I’m a pretty private person,” Suzuki said, “I had
to figure out a way they would only see a blank wall behind me.”
The solution was to carve out a section of a storage space
in her mother’s apartment, conveniently located just below hers. Her “public”
perch — an oak-colored table and black office chair — has provided some
separation between her work and personal lives, allowing her to turn on and off
her “performer brain,” as she described it. It has not always been easy.
“I really have to compartmentalize,” she said. “I still had
to create a public persona at home.” Yet she also found that being able to
stake such a clear divide between public and private was comforting, she said.
If you are not enthusiastic about sharing so much, that is
OK.
“It’s fair for someone to say what their needs are,”
Poswolsky said. “Create a boundary around ‘I don’t want to let people into my
space in a vulnerable way.’”
And consider taking your time easing back into situations
that now give you pause.
Creary said she observed two sources of concern for those
who enjoyed the firm boundaries they formed working from home and are now
anticipating a return to the workplace: that the change of location will
decrease productivity because distractions abound, and that it will increase
exposure to unhealthy social environments.
She suggested two possible strategies to establish
boundaries anew: Think about what time of day you tend to work best and plan
meetings and other obligations accordingly, she said, and weigh which social
engagements — dinners, happy hours and the like — are essential and which ones
you can decline.
“It’s about pacing ourselves,” Creary said.
Keep having tough conversations
According to Natalie Bazarova, an associate professor of
communication at Cornell University who studies public intimacy, social media
users largely shared positive personal information before the pandemic. But
over the course of the past 15 months, there has been a change.
“There is more acceptance of negative disclosures,” she said,
citing research she published this year. “There is this common circumstance
that we’re going through, and so that shapes our perception of how we think
about what’s appropriate.”
So, what does that look like? Some social media users have
posted more frequently about how the pandemic has affected their mental health,
De Choudhury said. And posts detailing social justice resources and recounting
experiences with racism spread across Instagram last summer as people sought to
engage online with the widespread protests that followed the murder of George
Floyd.
According to a 2020 article in the International Journal of
Information Management, social media users have also posted more regularly
about their health, particularly underlying conditions that make them
vulnerable to COVID-19 — in part aiming to encourage others to take the
coronavirus pandemic seriously.
Such conversations can have a destigmatizing effect, making
it more acceptable to be frank about the challenges individuals and groups have
faced this past year (or longer; many of the structural inequalities the
pandemic exposed well predated it). If you feel comfortable participating in
them, continue to do so both online and off — but be mindful of sharing too
much.
“We have to be very conscious of the information we put out
there for everyone to see,” Bazarova said.
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