How Shorthand's content team hang out online
By Thomasin Sleigh
I am tired of the sight of my face. I’m always there, in all my meetings, smiling, nodding, turning my mute button on, and off, and on again. My focus drifts from my colleagues’ problem-solving and chatter back to my face, framed by its tidy box on Zoom. My face looks older when I laugh. Is this top too informal? Are my shoulders hunched?
Shorthand is a completely distributed company. We work online and live across the world, in many places — Brisbane, London, Seattle, and Wellington — and we Zoom into meetings from our lounges, libraries, and co-working spaces.
I worked remotely during the pandemic, but fully distributed work is new for me, and for many of my colleagues. Many of us are newly hired in Shorthand’s marketing team and have never met each other in person.
I’m old enough that I’ve spent most of my working life in busy, body-filled offices. And I wonder, as my face follows me around my work day: How is this different? Is it better? Worse? Do we create ideas differently online? Is it possible to simply hang out with people you’ve never met in person? And, importantly, can online interactions really be casual, fun, and creative?
There is no neat answer to this list of questions. But here are a collection of thoughts I’ve gathered about how to hang out online after nearly a year of fully remote work.
Wait, do we really need to hang out at work?
When we’re at work, we’re supposed to be working, right? Yes, of course, but anyone who has worked as part of a team in an office, hospital, classroom, farm, or anywhere, really, will know two facts:
- Good ideas happen when you’re hanging out.
- You need to know and trust your team as the flawed and fantastic humans that they are, so you can do great work together — and hanging out is a tried and true way of getting to know people.
I’m sure there are myriad links I could post here about workplace collaboration and connection, but I’m not going to, as these would add fuel to the popular Silicon Valley mythology that informal in-person interactions are where the spark of innovation happens. This metanarrative is unproven, but I feel confident in suggesting that most humans need to share a bond with their workmates to feel supported and trusted; to know that they can reach out and ask for help; to know that they can share an idea with someone and work together to solve a knotty problem in a way that wouldn’t have been possible on their own.
What do we lose when we work online?
Online, we lose serendipitous meetups. When you’re working in a workshop, a garden centre, or a busy kitchen, you run into your workmates by accident. You get off the bus and your colleague enters your building at the same time; you chat with a co-worker while waiting in line to get a coffee, or as the photocopier chugs through its queue of jobs.
These slight, liminal interactions help you understand your workmates. Where have they caught the bus from? What sort of coffee do they like? The tidbits accumulate so that you have more of a sense of your workmates as people with full and weird lives, and of their likes and dislikes.
Online, accidents don’t happen as much. There are too many parameters, too much scheduling. You have to be deliberate and precise in your communication. Sure, you can ping someone a short Slack message but the words are still read in the context of your screen, which is your workspace. And online, you don’t have to respond straight away, you can sit and think for a while about your response. You lose the temporal immediacy of running into someone in the lift, for example, and that changes the way we think and respond.
Online, digital text doesn’t disappear or atrophy in the same way as words spoken in real time; we think too much, perhaps, and we think without our bodies.
If you schedule hanging out, is it truly hanging out?
At Shorthand, we’ve realised, not without irony, that hanging out online takes a bit of work. This leads to circular questions: If you schedule hanging out, is it truly hanging out? If there’s an appointment in your calendar, is this the opposite of a serendipitous, organic, time-wasting hang out?
I imagine that Sheila Liming, the author of a new book Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time would say that if something is booked into your calendar, this isn’t hanging out. Her timely book makes the case that the pandemic, social media, smartphones, and shifting social etiquette have caused a crisis in hanging out. No one knows how to do it anymore, she argues, but it is enormously important for our mental health, wellbeing, and, ironically, our productivity.
But, for argument's sake, let’s say that as the first generation of humans to work on computers, apart from each other — in offices, dining room tables, libraries, and parks — towards a shared goal, we should cut ourselves some slack. And, if we do have to book in our hanging out on the internet, how can we do it better?
Wait, do we really need to hang out at work?
When we’re at work, we’re supposed to be working, right? Yes, of course, but anyone who has worked as part of a team in an office, hospital, classroom, farm, or anywhere, really, will know two facts:
- Good ideas happen when you’re hanging out.
- You need to know and trust your team as the flawed and fantastic humans that they are, so you can do great work together — and hanging out is a tried and true way of getting to know people.
I’m sure there are myriad links I could post here about workplace collaboration and connection, but I’m not going to, as these would add fuel to the popular Silicon Valley mythology that informal in-person interactions are where the spark of innovation happens. This metanarrative is unproven, but I feel confident in suggesting that most humans need to share a bond with their workmates to feel supported and trusted; to know that they can reach out and ask for help; to know that they can share an idea with someone and work together to solve a knotty problem in a way that wouldn’t have been possible on their own.
What do we lose when we work online?
Online, we lose serendipitous meetups. When you’re working in a workshop, a garden centre, or a busy kitchen, you run into your workmates by accident. You get off the bus and your colleague enters your building at the same time; you chat with a co-worker while waiting in line to get a coffee, or as the photocopier chugs through its queue of jobs.
These slight, liminal interactions help you understand your workmates. Where have they caught the bus from? What sort of coffee do they like? The tidbits accumulate so that you have more of a sense of your workmates as people with full and weird lives, their likes and dislikes.
Online, accidents don’t happen as much. There are too many parameters, too much scheduling. You have to be deliberate and precise in your communication. Sure, you can ping someone a short Slack message but the words are still read in the context of your screen, which is your workspace. And online, you don’t have to respond straight away, you can sit and think for a while about your response. You lose the temporal immediacy of running into someone in the lift, for example, and that changes the way we think and respond.
Online, digital text doesn’t disappear or atrophy in the same way as words spoken in real time; we think too much, perhaps, and we think without our bodies.
If you schedule hanging out, is it truly hanging out?
At Shorthand, we’ve realised, not without irony, that hanging out online takes a bit of work. This leads to circular questions: If you schedule hanging out, is it truly hanging out? If there’s an appointment in your calendar, is this the opposite of a serendipitous, organic, time-wasting, hang out?
I imagine that Sheila Liming, the author of a new book Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time would say that if something is booked into your calendar, this isn’t hanging out. Her timely book makes the case that the pandemic, social media, smartphones, and shifting social etiquette have caused a crisis in hanging out. No one knows how to do it anymore, she argues, but it is enormously important for our mental health, wellbeing, and, ironically, our productivity.
But, for argument's sake, let’s say that as the first generation of humans to work on computers, apart from each other — in offices, dining room tables, libraries, and parks — towards a shared goal, we should cut ourselves some slack. And, if we do have to book in our hanging out on the internet, how can we do it better?
Find your shiny person
I had a friend who once described ‘shiny’ people to me, and this adjective has always stayed with me. These shiny people draw other people to them like magpies are attracted to shiny jewels. They are bright, positive, and love to find out about other people. They get energy and inspiration from hanging out, and they need to do it to fuel their ideas and job satisfaction.
Hopefully you’re lucky, like we are at Shorthand, and you have one of these people on your team. They will likely be the instigator of hanging out; it comes naturally to them and they will have good ideas about how to do it. You need to direct this energy but also feed into it, because hanging out online is weird and new for everyone, and your shiny person definitely can’t do it alone.
Do something while you do nothing
At Shorthand, we’ve discovered that hanging out online can be better when you’re doing something else. Staring at everyone’s faces on the screen can feel like a meeting, because that’s the same space that you have your meetings, and you don’t have the option to go to the staff room, the cafe, or the pub, or some other alternate break-out space where conversation can wander and work concerns can drift into the background.
So, meet up on Zoom, but then do something else. You and your team will have your own interests and energies that will determine what this thing is. At Shorthand, we’ve done quizzes and games that require quick responses and thinking, but we’ve also tried out more digressive, tangential activities such as online puzzles and even followed a Bob Ross painting tutorial together.
Great hanging out is about the stories that you share together, and doing another online activity makes these stories rise to the surface more naturally than when you are confined to Zoom’s gridded matrix. The goal is to de-structure what is highly structured time; that little, persistent clock in the top right of your screen is hard to escape.
Shorthand's content team hanging out online.
Shorthand's content team hanging out online.
Take risks and have different expectations
Unless some historian can leap in with an example of a pre-internet model of distributed work that mirrors what we do now (and there may well be an example of this), we are the first humans to work this way. There are probably 10,000 (and counting) theses being written about the sociological, political, and health impacts of distributed teams and the complex way that these will play out.
Situated as we are at the leading edge of this way of being and working together, we’re trying out a lot of stuff at Shorthand. We also regularly acknowledge that not everything will be great and there are digital interactions that are more rewarding than others.
Experimenting with different ways to hang out will probably mean you have a few flops. So what? Software might act up, or your allocated 45 minutes will cut short goodbyes; it's just another story to tell when you're next hanging out with your team.
Be okay with nothing being nothing
There is a rich seam in contemporary popular culture and sociology that flips the conventional, capitalistic ideas of productivity as solely being the result of hard, unrelenting work. I’m thinking about Elizabeth Day’s popular podcast, How to Fail, and Jenny Oddell’s How to do Nothing, as well as Sheila Liming’s book that I’ve noted above.
These podcasts and books make the point that good ideas and creative breakthroughs can come from unexpected places and from ostensibly unproductive time. Writers also frequently highlight the connection between walking and writing — aimless walking feeds into the strange and complex process of putting words on a page.
This argument can be circular, however, and make unproductive time sneakily productive and work-like. You’re not allowed to make a mistake without taking away some salutary, life-guiding lesson, or you can’t spend time reading a good book without chalking it up on Goodreads, and thus performing your productivity.
It’s easy to be swayed by the incursion of productivity into nothing time, but, in Shorthand’s content team, our hanging out time is when we breathe, when we listen, when we drift away from the self-surveillance of our faces on Zoom.
In these moments, our productivity is vaguely defined by the good work we’ve done, and the connections we’ve been able to strengthen across our team. The benefits are barely there, though, sometimes not there at all — and that’s okay with us.
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