Social connection is vital, especially during a pandemic. Even experts in mental wellbeing and connectedness can be taken by surprise. Arif Ongu from the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion shares his practical experiences of things we can all do to keep our teams connected while we work apart.
The idea for afternoon catch-ups was sparked when, to my surprise, the agenda of our upcoming team meeting read: ‘Arif will be leading the staff wellbeing team’.
As a training specialist I have a background working in mental health and delivering mental health first aid and awareness training to UTS staff. I’m known to bring up issues of team mental wellbeing, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised after all. But I was!
Ensuring our university community’s mental health and wellbeing is taken care of is a crucial part of the work we do at the centre, and UTS’s social justice agenda more broadly.
As humans we’re social creatures and even the most introverted of us require connection to maintain our psychological wellbeing. With so many members of our team working from home during COVID-19, my aim was to create opportunities to connect.
Planned, fun activities are great and have their place. And, since we started working remotely, we’ve run several of them in the centre. They’ve included a team’s trivia session where I took the opportunity to include only culturally diverse questions like ‘what is Vietnam’s largest export’ (electrical machinery and equipment) and ‘what is the currency of Ghana’ (Ghanaian New Cedi), and a self-recorded talent quest where one colleague’s dance rendition of Ice Ice Baby with her daughters providing backup unanimously took out the prize. These kinds of activities provide an opportunity to get together in a light-hearted and fun atmosphere. But, what they don’t provide is meaningful connection or a forum where people can talk about their feelings.
What we realised we needed was a regular, ongoing opportunity for people to connect. But one that was also flexible enough to meet our changing needs. That’s why I started a daily afternoon catch-up.
Every afternoon at 4.30pm I open a Zoom session for anybody in the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion feeling isolated but not confident to reach out more informally, or just catch up and engage in some banter. The number of people attending varies from seven right down to two. Most days, we have light-hearted chats about current events or we vent about life in general, talking about books we have read, shows we watch and the stupidity of political leaders here and around the world.
There have only been two occasions since we started working remotely that someone hasn’t dropped in. I’ve assured colleagues who worried about me waiting on Zoom by myself that I’m content to leave it running in the background while I continue with my work. The catch-ups are there for people when they need them and shouldn’t be a source of extra pressure where people feel obligated to come along. But, it’s often during the smaller sessions of two when people feel most comfortable to talk about work, personal issues they’re experiencing and concerns about life in the post-COVID world. Common themes to have emerged from these sessions relate to financial anxiety, worries about losing their jobs or becoming sick and not being able to earn. There is also a lot of gratitude expressed acknowledging that we still have our jobs, and empathy towards those in the UTS community and more broadly who may be suffering.
The feedback I’ve received so far is that my colleagues valued the opportunity to connect and have an informal chat. Interestingly, even teammates that had never joined a session expressed that just the knowledge of the sessions being available each afternoon gave them a sense of comfort, because if they did feel the need to connect they could join at any point.
The catch-ups have also provided the opportunity for several teams in the centre who don’t work together to get to know each other. There was even a project to create an anonymous reporting mechanism for race-related concerns such as microaggressions, conceived in one of these cross-team interactions that is now in planning for delivery during spring session. Another unintended benefit has been the fact that colleagues are able to neatly end their workday as opposed to losing track of time and finding themselves working well into the evening.
As the number of COVID cases seems again to be on the rise the uncertainty and disempowerment we are now living with makes the need for human connection more crucial, but the opportunity to do so is less available. These afternoon catch-ups will provide an ongoing, predictable and dependable opportunity to do so. And as a unit we will continue to connect socially, have fun, and be there to support and care for each other.