How do I talk to my colleagues again?

- [Jessi] From the news team at LinkedIn, I'm Jessi Hempel, and this is Hello Monday. Welcome back to the Reopening Series. This week we're onto our third of six big questions about what we want from work. This one's super practical. Now that a lot of us are back in person, at least sometimes, how do we talk to our colleagues again? I don't think it's possible to overestimate how challenging it's going to be to figure out a new office culture. We didn't leave offices. Offices left us. They were for a time a dangerous idea, gathering in any way was. And beyond quarantine itself, our grief and loss wasn't only focused on COVID-19. We felt it in the loss of black lives to police violence, and through all of that, we also, some of us, we started new jobs and welcomed new colleagues. It was all just so much. So how do you make small talk after that? I called the very best person I could think of to advise us on this, Esther Perel. Esther's a couples therapist, an expert on relationships and relating. Perhaps you've heard her podcasts "Where Should We Begin?" And "How's Work?" Well, today is really all about workplace relationships. Here's Esther. - [Esther] The collective grief sits on top of a few other things, right? The first thing has been a prolonged sense of uncertainty. And a prolonged sense of uncertainty means that we still actually are uncertain about when the uncertainty will end. But we live in a society that primes mastery, and that experiences mastery as a form of control over destiny. And it is very challenging for people who live by that ethos to understand and to grapple, not understand, to grapple, to tolerate uncertainty. You know, one of the very interesting findings after 9/11 was that the people who came down the towers, and were there to speak about their experiences, those who lived with the notion of things happen did much better mental health wise, than those who live with the notion of you make things happen, life is in your hand, you control destiny. In the sense of the resilience, the ability to bounce back, in the notion of, "I did the best I could with the circumstances that I could not control," it's very different than those people who think that you can shape the circumstances. So we have prolonged uncertainty. With that, we have the collective grief. And when I talk about collective grief, it is the notion of not just the physical loss of real life, it is the loss of normalcy as we knew it, it is the loss of our references, as we relied on them, it is the fact that this is a collective trauma, and that we tend to narrate trauma in this country very much from an individual point of view, and that kind of experience demands mass mutual reliance, to not just, "Let's move on." This "Let's move on thing," you know, that is very much a part of America's effort optimism, that you can roll up your sleeves, and just get right back in there, and get to work, is often accompanied by a lot of other substances that are meant to tame and mute all the inner rumblings and fears and pains that roil inside of us, in order to just be stoic. So then comes the notion of ambiguous loss. It's not that we left the office, but the office that we used to rely on, that was an equalizer for many of us, that was a place where we could actually go and experience some sense of competence, a mastery, autonomy, et cetera, collaboration, community, mentorship, belonging, all of what work means today, in that sense. And because loss is a term that was developed by Pauline Boss, it's a very, very important term, because what she talked about was what happens in situations, like, for example, where people are still physically present, but psychologically gone, like in Alzheimer's. You can't really resolve the grief, because the loss isn't complete. Or people who have disappeared, or are in war, they are physically gone, but they are emotionally and psychologically very present. The towers of the offices are standing. They are physically present, but they are hollow inside. The streets of midtown, in most cities, where those towers are, have become empty zones. One day, everything stopped. By the way, everything stopped by people telling you that you were going home for the weekend to see if the digital and the remote worked. Then you were told you're going to stay home for two weeks, and then you never came back. And that is the prolonged uncertainty too. And these experiences, to me, describe a little bit the social context that is pervasive to our sense of mental health and mental wellness at this moment or emotional wellness. - [Jessi] You know, Esther, I have just started coming back to our office in the Empire state Building. And a couple of things have been very surprising to me. One is I didn't exactly know how to talk to people again. And I walked in, and one of my first interactions, I saw somebody who I know lightly, right? I haven't seen 'em or thought about them in a year and a half, quite honestly. And there we were next to each other, and he said to me, "So how was your pandemic?" And it was the most grating thing. I can't describe it. I didn't know what to say or how to answer. It felt, at once, both too deep a question to give a stranger an answer to, and also too shallow a question to deign to answer. How are we supposed to navigate those interactions? - [Esther] What did you do? - [Jessi] I said, "Oh, well, you know, how are you supposed to answer that? It was kind of awful, but here we are. And what do you want for breakfast? - [Esther] I think that what's interesting is that, in the way you say it, anyway, he was trying to make a kind of a light of it. like it's manageable. It's a finite amount of issues that we need to deal with. And not it is an existential upheaval. It is a reorganization of our priorities. It is the task of what we often call effort optimism, and particularly tragic optimism. You know the term of Viktor Frankl, tragic optimism? And how did people continue to find meaning and hope in all of what they were doing? So I think sometimes an answer is very much, "It was a reorganization of my life. It led me to some very deep thinking. I lost some very dear people. I am actually really feeling very strange today. I am here because there were moments where I wasn't sure that I would ever come back to this office. I noticed how you wish that one could create a beautiful bow tie to your question, and just give you a snappy one sentence. I wish I could. I'm not there yet. I don't think we will ever be." - [Jessi] That's a beautiful answer, Esther. I wish I had it at the tip of my tongue, but it's also an answer that, at least before the pandemic, was the kind of answer I reserved for my friends and people who I felt I knew well, or knew in a personal capacity. And it strikes me that one result of what we've all been through is that it's possible that when we're in person together, we will talk to each other differently, that we will make more room for each other. And I'm just curious, again, that situation with that colleague, what's it going to take for me to start to set a new norm and feel comfortable giving an answer like that? What needs to be true about the culture of my organization? - [Esther] Look, you're going to have in every organization people who want to reduce this global crisis to a set of tasks. They did it from the beginning by buying toilet paper and disinfectants. And they felt that they can handle this. They got this. And like in any situation in a company, you have those who want to talk about process and those who want to talk about outcome. You have those who want to talk about the inner experience, and you want those who want to talk about solutions. And these live side by side. So when a person says, "How was the pandemic?" He was almost trying to say, "Hi, what did you have for breakfast?" Kind of thing. - Yes. - [Esther] And you will say to him, "You know, if you ask a healthy person what did they have for breakfast, the answer is very simple. But if you ask a person who has just been deprived of food for the last year what did they have for breakfast, there is no simple answer, but the beauty of it is that, you, Mister, actually have been deprived of the same food. Do you feel like you are able to address this already? When you ask the question, is it 'cause you're prepared to hear, or is it also 'cause you're still trying to find a way for you to address this question for yourself?" - [Jessi] Such an elegant point, Esther. And it makes me think about how I actually do answer the question. And the truth is, I have five different answers, and I cycle through them not based on who I'm speaking with, but how I feel in relation to by feelings. And by that, I mean, some days my answer is, "It was horrible. I was sad. I felt numb. And I felt sometimes like I couldn't get out of bed." And some days my answer is, "Oh, well, you know, I had it pretty good compared to a lot of people. I didn't have any direct loss. I'm still employed. I've got a job. Things are going great." And there's a gradation of answers on that scale. And I think it reflects the fact that a lot of us coming back to each other, we haven't made sense for ourselves of what we've all just been through. - [Esther] And that's why I think that you will have a diversity of answers, because you didn't just have one experience. And depending on the circumstances, the day, your mood, who you're talking to, who you talk to an hour before, you will be emphasizing different parts of your experience, all normal. I think what will be interesting is, you know, everybody's so obsessed with the return to normal. We're not returning. We are coming back. Some of us transformed, some of us slightly nudged, you know, depending on the range, and from a very powerful experience that we have only begun to put into words and to organize and integrate. And I think that the beauty will be, if the managers are able to take time from the meetings, and basically say, "We're not going to pretend nothing happened and we are just back here in the office, 'cause we're all sitting in this room. We need to touch base with each other. We need to know where each body is coming back from. We need to know that some of you may have had some very painful experiences that may at times make you less focused. We need to know not who is coming back only, but how are you coming back, with what are you coming back?" And just have small 15, 20-minute check-ins, and maybe you do them for a few weeks, and you just create an environment that says, "You matter. You matter. We want to hear how you are, what's happened to you, what are you bringing back to. Are there different things that you need at this moment from us in order for you to do your job?" And if people are not afraid... You know, there is often this notion that if you talk about something, you make it bigger, you make it more real. No, the fact is that if you don't talk about something, you actually can also make it bigger, and make it way more real. So acknowledge this. What were the care systems that you experienced? Who did you have to take care of? You know, did you leave? Did you have to move back into your family home that you had to run away from 10 years ago? - [Jessi] Yeah, and you're right. We're not moving forward to go back to a new normal, we're moving forward into a work circumstance that hasn't really been invented yet. We're going to invent it in real time. And sometimes we'll be in person together, and sometimes we will likely still be across screens from each other. What do we know about the differences in the way that we relate and trust each other in one circumstance versus the other. - [Esther] I used to study love online. And one of the things that we often talked about in those research is that you bypass the geographic distance, you contract that distance, and you actually can share a lot more very personal information with people that you don't know. So now we are talking about what is work online, right? How do you relate in online? I look at you right now, I'm not making any eye contact. I think I see you. I think you make eye contact with me. Every time I watch a video again, I realize, "Where was I looking?" And therefore the mirror neurons are not operating. Usually our structure comes from changing clothes and changing location to go to our different activities. When you go to exercise, when you go to see friends, when you go to a concert, when you go to the park, when you go to work, you leave, you create a before and after. There is a separation in time and in space. That is really grounding structure. That gives us a sense of stability, an inner anchor. All of that got dissolved, completely dissolved. Coming back to the office is coming back to the restaurant, coming back to seeing people in person, it will demand a reconstitution of all these boundaries, of all the structural elements of our lives that orient us. There's a reason we've been kind of exhausted. So what do we get on Zoom? A tremendous amount on Zoom or any of the devices. We managed to continue, you know, the very tools that, pre-pandemic, we were talking about them as they disconnect people, became the very tools that we talked about how they maintained the connection between people. It's a both ends, you know? At the same time, when we come together, we have everything that has to do with the human element, creativity, mentorship, collaboration, community, that notion, you know, the small talk, the humor, the eye gazes, that entire realm of interaction, of bonding, of communicating, of learning, especially for those who were not on cruise control. You and I were on cruise control. We have already internalized a ton, you know, that we could take with us. So we could kind of fill in the blanks, but people that are starting to work, that have never sat in those rooms, that have never checked in with others, that don't know the norms, the culture. Culture is not just made out of a piece of paper in which it is written "One, two, three, four." Those people will have an experience when they come at work that is just very different. - [Jessi] In your show, this past season, you spoke to the members of a newsroom. It's a large group, 65, 70 people. And partway through the show, it came out that the newsroom had gotten a new leader over the course of the last year, an editor-in-chief who had never physically met the people in the newsroom. - [Esther] Nor ever had a spontaneous moment. Every zoom call is scheduled. You know, when you are cut off of the happenstance of the serendipity, of the chance encounters, of the spontaneous, you are cut off of what I call eros, the life force, that energy. It's not just never having met the people, it's that he says, "I've never met any one of you, and I've never had a spontaneous meeting with anyone of you." I mean, your heart sinks, you feel that loss, you feel, "How is he doing it?" - [Jessi] Yeah, entirely. - [Esther] But I interrupted you. You were going to say something. - [Jessi] Oh, no, you didn't interrupt me at all, but it does make me think... Like, there's another thing that I hadn't expected about coming back to the office, and that is, I vaguely knew this was true, but at home... Now, keep in mind, Esther, I'm the mother of two very small children. I have a two-year-old and a 10-week-old. And right now my minutes are very judiciously used. And I was able to be so productive this year, because there was no spontaneity. There was no small talk. There was no one to run into. And as happy as I am to have all of that back, I also don't quite know how to interact with it again, 'cause it's slowing me down, and I feel very anxious about wanting to maintain my level of productivity. And my mind hasn't registered that actually this is a different kind of productivity, but also important. Does that make sense? - [Esther] Yes, but you are also talking to me from a particular developmental stage. You have a 10-week-old. That's a developmental stage. Part of what you're saying to me now, you would be saying to me. Yes, that's true. - At any time. You understand? - That's true. - [Esther] You know, every moment is precious. And let me say something, that poetic side, that spontaneous side, that playful side, that serendipity, happenstance side, you have it with your 10-week-old. A baby, an infant, and even a toddler give you that. Certainly the infant gives you that. So you get the nibbling, the tickling, the adoring gaze, the playing, the cooing, you're in that realm. And it's a mistake to think that your childcare is only productive. Your childcare, at this point, is about bonding, it's about aw, or it's about adoring, it's about protecting. And all of these things are not just in the realm of productivity. - [Jessi] We're going to take a quick break here. When we get back, we'll talk about the impact of last year's protests and our subsequent push for social justice. And we're back with Esther Perel. Last year, social justice awakening happened while many of us were at home. It heightened conversations around equity and inclusion. So now many of us are back in person, and we're trying to figure out how do we have real conversations about this at work. - [Esther] I'm going to piggyback on the thing we just spoke about. You were describing yourself as a mother of a newborn. One of the very interesting normative cultural changes has been the relationship from parent to child. One of the very classic ones that you can easily go to is affection, actually, has remained, but it's the authority that has shifted, the way one manifests authority as a parent, corporal punishment, discipline, okay? Every parent today has to think how are they going to get the child to comply, to follow the rules of the home, to do what is respectful, their responsibility, without abiding by norms that have been historically completely accepted and passed down across generations. So this is to give you a reference. I always look for an analogy of another place where people have had to rethink how they talk, how they deal with reality, how they organize information, how they communicate it, et cetera. This is going to be a lot of that kind of stumbling, right? And it is not just having programs that come to do inclusion and diversity and equity. Again, I think that the reckoning that is taking place around race, around class, I mean, around gender, you have a job, you manage to deal with two children and a full-time job. The amount of women who have stepped out of the workforce, you know, there are many big questions that are not always included in the conversation. And what you will see is that often people narrate their experience during the pandemic very much in terms of how they experienced it. And so they assume that that becomes the collective experience. And slowly people are going to learn to ask questions, and then to listen, because the way you listen shapes the way the other person answers. You know, a cultural shift starts with a little more hesitation. - [Jessi] Last year, Esther launched a show called "How's Work?" It's in its second season, and it's basically couples therapy, but for people who work together. This season, there's an episode about two friends, a white woman and a black gay man. Their friendship had pretty much blown up, as the guy says- - [Man] She's my work wife, and I was the work husband, then we got a divorce. - [Jessi] The reasons are wrapped up in race and gender. And getting to the bottom of them, it offers a lesson in understanding how the larger dynamics of our culture are shifting our personal relationships. It's a hard episode to listen to. And at the end of the show, I didn't feel resolved. - [Esther] They waited for a year to come and do this episode. So they have been sitting with that. It's not that they waited to come for the podcast, but they sat with that. They knew something isn't being addressed. They're swirling around it. And I think one of the most interesting pieces, and that's why you say it wasn't resolved, I actually think they resolved lots. When you think about it in terms of reconnecting, breathing space again, reclaiming fondness for each other, really hearing. But the fundamental difference, some of the irreconcilable difference that they have, which is that she wanted his response to her to be completely rooted in their one-on-one relationship. And he basically says to her, "I cannot just see you outside of the context, the bigger context of our relationship, that includes primarily race in this instance. And you would like to individualize our story and our conflict and why I didn't support you, but my not supporting you is not just about you. Who I am isn't just something I defined from the insight. It's also how I'm perceived from the outside. Identity is a two-way process. And my behavior is scrutinized differently than your behavior. And my support of you has a larger social meaning than just our personal relationship. And that is something you need to know. You may not like it. You may still wish I had stood by you, but I think you need to understand what I was deliberating with as we were going through this crisis at work. And some things are not resolved, as in, you know, we hug each other at the end, and it's a sweet little bow tie. This is not the story. The articulation of this fundamental difference, the ability to come to terms with it, and to integrate it, and to maintain the fondness, is actually a part of what many polarized relationships these days, be them around racial differences, political differences, are demanding, is the ability to do both, see the humanity of the individual and see the larger collective meaning of what that relationship stands for in our society.