Canadian HR Reporter

N E W S 12 www.hrreporter.com Greater use of virtual technology leads to toxic communications Abuse, discrimination, racism, bullying and harassment are all migrating from shared workplaces to work from home and it's affecting workers' well-being and mental health ― especially among women and people of colour, writes John Dujay longer exists at work and it brings on unpleasant actions, she says. There's a "lack of social cues or gestures and body language that we normally have, and our brains have to work so much harder to fill in those gaps… That was part of what was exhausting everyone when we started talking about Zoom fatigue and burnout." Being fed up with the seemingly endless series of video meetings could also be another reason why a lot of people are behaving badly, says Pringle. "It's not uncommon that people are on Zoom calls from nine o'clock until five o'clock and maybe aren't even thinking about lunch breaks or natural relief breaks throughout the day. All of this factors in in terms of how people end up feeling and then how they end up engaging with each other." Employees' general communication is also becoming more unpleasant, such as passive-aggressive tones, says Habib. "Some of the stresses of our personal lives are seeping into how we communi- said it happened over video conferencing or messaging such as Slack, while 28 per cent said it happened by email. Why the bad behaviour? This behaviour tends to exacerbate dynamics that existed pre-pandemic, says Kiljon Shukullari, team lead of the advice team at Peninsula Canada in Toronto. "[It's about] individuals interacting with each other by conference calling where two individuals — one that's probably more imposing — using their position maybe to exert extra pressure on the employee [and] the employee feeling alone [and] not feeling that support of the team or someone they can reach out to based on the fear that 'Somebody might be listening if I use conference calling.'" The inability to perceive social signals through in-person conversations is also behind some of the toxic messaging, says Ramona Pringle, associate professor at the RTA School of Media at Ryerson University in Toronto. "A day at the office is being replaced by a day of Zoom meetings and people were thrown into it without really thinking about the social practices or social norms," she says. With many workers confined to their homes, the feeling of sharing a space no cate at work, and that certainly presents itself as microaggressive chats and emails." Discriminatory comments For some workers, the news is even worse, finds the survey of 1,036 Americans in October 2020. "Workplace communication is much more toxic for people of colour than for white people," says May Habib, co-founder and CEO of Writer. Workers of colour received unpleasant messages more often than white workers, with 28 per cent coming via email and 27 per cent via video and messaging tools. "That really didn't surprise me, [but] the magnitude of it definitely surprised us," she says. Fifty-two per cent of people of colour had received some form of toxic communication since the pandemic began, compared to 32 per cent of white people. Family status is another way people are being discriminated against, according to the survey. One in five workers was criticized for family "A day at the office is being replaced by a day of Zoom meetings, and people were thrown into it without really thinking about the social practices or social norms." Ramona Pringle, Ryerson University BAD behaviour has always been a reality at many workplaces, but with the major spike in video meetings since the beginning of the pandemic that forced many employees home, it has now manifested itself virtually. Thirty-eight per cent of respondents to a survey conducted by Writer, a San Francisco-based producer of writing assistant software, said they had experienced toxic communication in the v i r t u a l w o r k p l a c e — s u c h a s discrimination, racism or generally harassing comments — and 27 per cent VIRTUAL COMMUNICATIONS PROVE TOXIC 27% Percentage of people who experienced toxic communication over video software 52% Percentage of people of colour who received some form of toxic communication 32% Percentage of white people who received some form of toxic communication Source: Writer.com

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