The recent report about the hybrid working environment's negative impact on career development tells us that personal interaction impacts learning. The value of in-person interaction -- and the instant feedback that comes from it -- cannot be understated. These skills go beyond the nuts and bolts of how to do a job. They include important learning about how to engage in daily interactions that lead to good personal habits and how to drive collaboration.
Those simple interactions, such as gratitude that is expressed with more than the single dimension of an email ("thanks"), has been shown to actually create a more collaborative and productive working environment. But a gap appears to be developing in the virtual world, which might be attributable to the electronic working environment that fosters digital discard.
This behavior includes slights such as failing to respond to (or even acknowledge) a sender's communication, such as email, or leaving an email "on read". It is hard to imagine an employee failing to respond to a supervisor's question posed to the employee in person. But the easily dodged email in the digital divide emboldens this behavior.
A case can be made that observing someone the worker admires helps a worker build skills that cannot be taught from a book, course or screen. Watching someone successfully engage with others imparts important clues about how to behave in a workplace.
Developing those skills remotely is hard. But it is even harder for the worker to know what they are missing. Leaving the boss on read is probably not a great career move. But expanding the scope of personal interaction in the workplace is certainly worth considering.
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