Zoom Doom
Why Zoom isn't just bad for our mental health
In many ways, COVID-19 is democratizing the workplace like never before.
Remote work has made opportunities globally available, flexible working situations mean that parents don’t have to choose between work and family, etc.
That being said, the COVID-induced recession also means that this relatively new notion of 5 generations working together in the workplace for the first-time ever might be short-lived. As businesses struggle to stay afloat, the first ones on the chopping block are - no surprise - the older generation (“too expensive!”) and younger folks (“they barely have any experience, we were spending money on training them!”)
COVID-19 has also blessed us with serious Zoom fatigue, or as my friends at Oberland like to put it, Zoom Doom.
I’ll spare you the mental health ramifications of Zoom which are now well-documented (tip: hiding your self-view helps), but I also want to ask:
Can Zoom also be at fault for ageist practices in the virtual hiring process?
Source: Elpha
I often think of the the Boston Symphony study that enforced “blind” auditions to achieve gender parity within the orchestra. In these auditions, the musician’s gender and identity was concealed via a screen. The results speak for themselves - by conducting “blind” auditions, female musicians were 30% more likely to be hired than under non-blind audition circumstances.
Can the same “blind” audition principle be applied to virtual interviews? Michal Levison certainly thinks so.
Ally of the week: Michal Levison
Michal Levison started Seasoned Moments with the intention to use food as a gateway to connection and soon realized that this was exactly what the corporate world needed. 75% of office workers eat lunch alone. HR is a 24/7 lifecycle. People love to rag on millennials for being commitment-phobes and only staying at their job for 8 months on average (!), but this comes as no surprise to Michal. “They're not connected to anyone. So why should they feel compelled to stay?” she says.
Team-building is a multi-billion-dollar a year industry, but usually less effective in actually bringing teams together. Lunch is a built-in opportunity for connection and collaboration that really gets left aside in the middle of the workday. Her journey to Seasoned Moments - leading trainings for leaders to understand why lunch is so important as well as hosting corporate lunches herself - has not been an easy path.
Experiencing ageism as a 24-year-old
My first experience with ageism was in the beginning of my career, when I was hired as the special events director for a well-known non-profit. I was promoted to the senior management team 6 months into the role at the age of 24. Everyone else was at least 50 years old. There was ageism left and right - Everything from being called sweetie (by men and women) to the internal management team wanting to make my life a living misery.
The work didn’t speak for itself
The internal management team was so upset I was in this role as a young person. The executive director tried to turn my team against me - she would make up things that I said about them and my team would later tell me about it. She felt threatened that I was coming for her job.
My day-to-day was made so difficult, even though my output was so great. I was a champion for the company and brought in $1M in grants throughout my tenure there. But there was never any recognition.
Hitting rock bottom
The stress on my body was so tremendous - I finally tried to quit in August of 2001, but then they said “Things will get better, I promise.” Then 9/11 happened, and I had to evacuate all the employees by myself as a 24-year-old - because all the other senior managers were upstate. There was no recognition afterward. I realized my boss was never going to change, and the mindset was always “how much more can we squeeze out from this kiddo?” She dragged me along until finally — in March 2002 - I walked out.
Entrepreneurship was the only way
I also spent time in the advertising world where ageism is also rampant and I was the token-female account exec on an otherwise all-male team. It got to a point where I felt like there wasn't a spot for me in a traditional career setting. I also come from a different culture in Israel. Fitting in has not always been possible. Creating something for myself was the only way that I saw as a way forward for me. It’s been much better since starting my own company. I create and help others create an environment that's more productive and positive.
Phone > Zoom
Especially in a day and age where Zoom seem to be the default, Michal believes that phone (vs. video) interviews work to our collective benefit in the hiring process.
The more that we can do a “blind reading” of someone, the better. I don’t want to read your name on your resume or see what you look like. There’s bias in that! I feel like we all talk a big game, but by blind reading and judging someone by their thoughts & ideas & work as opposed to what they look like — we could actually create a much more diverse environment.
In Malcolm Galdwell’s Talking to Strangers, he elaborates on how reading someone’s facial expressions as indicators of what’s going on inside their head or heart is faulty practice, period. Mismatches between someone’s presentation and his or her true motivation are common, he writes, and can have a deep impact on presumptions of guilt or innocence.
“In real life, people don’t display their emotions on their face perfectly and accurately,” he says. “That’s one of the reasons that we make so many mistakes, particularly with strangers.”
One of the most well-known international criminal investigations was used as a case study for this phenomenon – the Amanda Knox murder trial.
Knox was convicted and imprisoned, but eventually acquitted, for the murder of her roommate in Perugia, Italy in 2007.
“The whole reason she was convicted was because the way she behaved in the wake of her roommates’ death did not match what people’s expectations of what grief ought to look like,” said Gladwell. “So the Italian police jumped to the conclusion that she was guilty.”
Knowing that facial expressions are no real proxy for anything meaningful anyways, and can lead to ageist practices (and other discriminatory practices on top of that — as I will repeat over and over, ageism will always intersect with other forms of discrimination)…
Is it time to say addio to Zoom interviews?
If this sparked anything for you, I’d love to hear!