David Vecsey’s July 17 article for The New York Times (“Greetings From a Dormant Newsroom,” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/insider/working-empty-newsroom.html) makes it very clear that people and work-aligned rituals need to be co-present in workplaces for organizations to perform to their full potential.
Vecsey reports on his recent experiences in the newsroom of The New York Times: “It’s quiet. Too quiet. . . I’m in a gigantic newsroom in a 52-story tower in the busiest neighborhood of one of the busiest cities in the world and – nothing. Not a sound. A sweeping look around reveals a barren landscape of empty desks and empty seats. A glance over the railings reveals two more floors in a similar state of nothingness. . . . Walking around, you spot a few faces. But not many. . . . What I do miss is the thrum of the newsroom, the energy of the city that used to never sleep, the clamor of phones, keyboards and my co-workers tossing out headline ideas or laughing over a gallows-humor joke on deadline.”
Humans develop rituals that guide the actions they take; not everything we do is a ritual, but rituals add structure and predictability to our lives. “Tossing out headline ideas” is a ritual. The predictability of rituals makes us feel comfortable. Rituals free up mental bandwidth to deal with the unexpected things that pop into our lives (and did so before many of us had any idea how to run a Zoom call). We don’t have to focus as much on moment-to-moment decisions when rituals apply. We trust groups that help us maintain rituals that support our personal and professional wellbeing. Fundamental consistencies in our lives boost our sense of wellbeing in ways that are less obvious to us today than to our earliest ancestors.
Our core goals relate to staple rituals in our lives. We are driven to be good at activities that matter to us (like our jobs), to have comfortable levels of control over the course of our lives (and that includes the environments around us), and to spend time with the other humans we select when we choose to do so. These objectives remain unchanged from our earliest days as a species. Over time and in the post-Covid pandemic world, however, our options for achieving these goals change—we attend training classes and go to birthday parties via Zoom or Skype instead of in person.
Returning to at-office work is difficult because after a sometimes-challenging transition period, we developed work-at-home rituals and now must transition back to many of our pre-pandemic ones to satisfy our fundamental drives, such as doing our jobs well.
With new health-related rules in place, returning to work can potentially compromise our ability to control our lives, but it seems likely that once we settle back into working at least a few days a week at the office we’ll re-establish previous control-related rituals such as choosing our own in-ear (via ear buds) soundscapes.
Re-establishing prior rituals, ones that don’t degrade new ones imposed to thwart the pandemic, will give us the structure we need to positively re-populate our offices and re-energize them.
We won’t productively return to workplaces until in-workplace rituals are established and they need to develop organically within options provided by organizations.
Transitioning from one set of space-based rituals to another sets us adrift and makes us stressed. In the context of new rituals required post-pandemic, maintaining whatever previous rituals we can bumps up our comfort and trust levels. When our ritual systems stabilize, they add positive structure to our lives.
Sally Augustin, PhD, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com). Research Design Connections reports on research conducted by social and physical scientists that designers can apply in practice. Insights derived from recent studies are integrated with classic, still relevant findings in concise, powerful articles. Topics covered range from the cognitive, emotional, and physiological implications of sensory and other physical experiences to the alignment of culture, personality, and design, among others. Information, in everyday language, is shared in a monthly subscription newsletter, an archive of thousands of published articles, and a free daily blog. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009), Designology (Mango, 2019), and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.