Huang: Remote work accelerates burnout by eliminating casual post-meeting relationship repair
Chieh Huang · Live From The HIBT Summit: Cynt Marshall, Chieh Huang, and Sadie Lincoln on Leadership · Jun 24, 2021 · at 31:36
Chieh Huang, co-founder and CEO of Boxed, discusses the hidden organizational costs and relationship friction discovered while managing teams remotely during the pandemic.
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“The lesson that I learned was really that if you think about kind of everyone as being a battery, by being completely remote, I think you discharge the battery at a very, at a much faster rate. For most folks at our very core, We're social human beings. Like, we want to see each other. We want to once in a while banter in the coffee room. We want to know how people's kind of weekends were and go out for a random coffee. Being in person, not all the time, but even some of the time, I found discharges that battery at a slower rate. And so you also find that what's really damaging towards kind of that discharge of that battery is also when you have a heated Zoom meeting where folks have differing points of view, as we often do running businesses, There's no repair time, and so there's no time to say, hey, after the meeting's over, that was a really contentious meeting. You got a minute in the hallway, or hey, do you want to go grab a coffee afterwards? There's no repair time. Yeah. You go off onto your next Zoom, which you're probably two minutes late for and it kind of festers over and over again, and so I think definitely what I learned is that you do need that human interaction, and that by going full remote, you can be as effective, but that battery just seems to discharge a little bit faster.”
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