The Show Goes On
It's July 13th, 2020, and as the second week of the summer program gets started it’s beginning to feel like we’re never going back to the office. Although summer seemed to be bringing a promise of less sickness, it appears as though the opposite has happened. While New York has finally reported its first day of zero COVID deaths since March, Florida and California are surpassing New York’s worst record days in cases. The cases are different - more young people and less deaths - but they are nonetheless consequential in terms of reopening. It’s becoming hard to even imagine going back to a world the way it “used to be.”
Getting used to video conferencing/constant screen time seems to be the new reality, and I’m certainly getting my fair share now that the summer program is in full swing. It’s interesting. I protested a lot about being able to do everything remotely that we did in person, but now seeing it actually played, out I’m realizing there is a significant difference. On the information side of it, what I had thought does seem to be true. We’re still getting the same speakers talking about the same things, with the same benefits and problems that comes with it based on who they are and what the topic is.
What’s missing are the side benefits.
There is no chatting with anyone in a side conversation as the meeting is beginning, no lingering after to listen to questions, no directing to the next conference room, or reminders about upcoming programs and deadlines, no quick questions the summers might be asking (like “can I take the food back to my office?”), and no mini meeting debriefings in the elevator afterwards. It’s purely - just work. And that seems to make a rather significant difference.
The virtual summer program is purely - just work.
By this time in a 'normal' in-person pre-COVID program, I would have felt like I was beginning to get a sense of who the summer associates were, and how the group behaved as a whole - even with my limited interactions with them as an assistant. Now, however, even two weeks in, they are still just faces on a screen. I have no sense of who they are, how they interact, what sorts of things make them unique, or what sorts of relationships they are forming with each other and with the lawyers at the firm. I feel very outside of the program, when by this time, I usually feel much more imbedded due to my role as keeper of the details.
Getting used to talking on video is also a bit of a barrier. In all honesty I sincerely dislike doing it. It makes me feel like I’m on center stage, even when I’m having a one-on-one conversation, and I’ve never liked speaking in the spotlight. I find myself striving not to have to talk, which is definitely hampering my ability to get to know the summers, as well as likely causing me to miss opportunities where it might have been helpful or good for the group. My personality is such that in general I look for opportunities to ease tension where I see it, but in this format I find doing that to be almost impossible because I am so apt to avoid being in the spotlight.
Not to mention tension is incredibly hard to gauge in this remote world.
What is awkward in a normal conversation - such as long silences - are kind of necessary in video-land due to the mute button delay. The polite thing to do while someone else is speaking is to mute your mic, which we all do, but then if you want to jump in, or respond quickly, you first must unmute yourself, and speakers generally have to sit in silence while you do that. And even in smaller groups when it’s more common to leave mics unmuted, most apps still have trouble handling two people speaking at the same time. Breaking tension in that situation would not be advised, but the tension remains.
So while I love being home, I can say with certainty now that there are benefits of being in the office that can’t be replaced with video conferencing.
I don’t know that those benefits aren’t worth the trade-off, however. I also don’t know that some of the things that are missing are simply because this is our first time doing the program virtually. Perhaps we simply haven’t gotten used to, and haven’t accounted for, the efforts that it will require to sustain real relationships virtually. We were flung rather unceremoniously into this virtual world, and although we’ve worked hard to recreate a virtual environment that resembles the physical for our summer associates, we have certainly not given much thought to ourselves. So perhaps the verdict should remain out. Perhaps we should continue to be students of this new virtual world we now live in, and resist passing judgment on what works and what doesn’t work quite yet.
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