Remote Empathy. How To Work From Home - Society

The same person can be a bosom friend with you, for example, on Facebook and an introverted functionary on WhatsApp. For each of us, this or that online platform has its own associative rows. Some on Facebook are a "political chatterbox", while WhatsApp is a tough professional

Someone goes all the way on Instagram (there is also a private messaging service there, which is very actively used), but "buttoned up" in e-mail. It should be taken into account that young people, as a rule, do not read e-mail at all, but those who do - educated adults - can answer in great detail, although not immediately.

Remote empathy

We have touched upon a rather complex issue of social hierarchy, which is often hushed up and distorted. However, life is now arranged in such a way that “the mountain goes to Mohammed” if it wants to receive money from Mohammed. In such conditions, it becomes important to ask how to make contact by all means of online communication as warm and appropriately informal as possible? Of course, if we are not talking about your old acquaintances, but about people with whom you interact at work and, probably, are not too close.

Digital autism (not to be confused with real autism), according to Dr. Kurpatov, the main Russian popularizer of psychiatry, medical psychotherapy and brain neurophysiology, is rapidly developing due to the fact that communication goes deeper and deeper into the online. At the same time, the default system of the human brain is focused on live communication and functions poorly without it.

Written online communication, which takes up the lion's share of all remote interaction (despite video conferencing, etc.), does not convey individual human intonations.

Very often neutral remarks, for example, a simple "ok" to some detailed passage, is perceived as rudeness, although in reality your interlocutor was just in the parking lot, driving and was torn between three incoming calls.

Given the fact that personal communication is also "mired in the abyss of online", more and more people are getting to know each other on the Internet through specialized dating applications. Many girls perceive likes and online winks as full-fledged signs of courting from men. There are a thousand ways to be offended by an insufficiently expressive emoticon to a friend's remark on social networks. This attention to detail leads to the fact that sometimes quite business and professional communication is heating up absolutely out of the blue.

All users of social networks are familiar with how the discussion under the open posts of bloggers reaches such an intensity of aggression, in comparison with which conquistadors and Scandinavian berserkers seem like cute cats.

The piquancy of the situation lies in the fact that a remote specialist plays on all fields of online communication at the same time. And on Tinder he flirts with fans / fans, and in the blogosphere swears because of politics, he answers his mother on the phone, and writes official letters to his boss. Not that this does not happen in large corporate offices, but nevertheless, there the external framework and the general context of the situation naturally limit such virtual chaos.

To prevent professional online communication from "overheating" out of the blue, we recommend:

1. Be emphatically polite

Between the phrase: "THE CONTRACT IS URGENT !!!" and “Please send me the April contract with Gorblastplast. If you make it before 11:00, it will be great! " - the difference is significant.

2. Take a break in difficult moments

The beauty of working remotely is that you can take a break, at least for a short time, at almost any moment of the correspondence. The connection was interrupted for a minute for one reason or another - you managed to catch your breath, so you didn't freeze the sharpness.

3. Be specific about timing arrangements

It often seems to us that bosses or clients are demanding the impossible, for example, being in touch 24 hours a day. But in most cases, everyone is quite satisfied with the exact orientation in the time range. If you keep someone in the dark: you do not respond to a reply, or you simply disappear with an incomplete task for an indefinite time on the eve of the deadline, then you put the person in a difficult and tense emotional state that will surely affect you. A message like: "I will be out of touch for two hours, I will send a contract by 13:00", usually solves such problems at the inception stage.

Remote empathy lies in the fact that you need to constantly design the situation in which your interlocutor may be. Where is he? In what context does he answer you? Rocking a baby, walking the dog, being at a meeting at the Presidential Administration, at a concert at the Bolshoi Theater, in a secluded home office, or perhaps on an airplane? If you understand that a person with a suitcase in one hand, a briefcase in the other and a smartphone squeezed between his shoulder and chin cannot answer you in full, you will have no reason for conflicts in remote professional communication.

But if you proceed from the assumption that the whole world at the moment is in exactly the same situation as yourself, you are guaranteed to have many problems.

The chapter "Empathy at a Distance" from the book "Remote. Express course on working from home”. Gleb Arkhangelsky, Olga Strelkova. M.: Bombora, 2020