The clock strikes 2pm and Slack notifies me that it’s time for the Our Community quiz. The perfect early afternoon breather, the crew at Our Community take it in turns to be the “Quiz Master” for a quick-fire, fifteen questions of trivia every day. While I love a good trivia session, I find myself often sitting back and enjoying the banter and sheer genius of most of the team.
Although it was started back in 2016 before coronavirus was even a blip on people’s radars, the daily ritual of digital connection has endured, and remains a source of joy while the team are physically apart.
With Melbourne recently surpassing 200 days of lockdown (and many more days with heavy restrictions) since the beginning of the pandemic, city-dwellers have experienced countless phases of lockdown experiences; from obsessing over Netflix’s Tiger King to weekly virtual trivia nights with family and friends. However, hitting the 18-month mark has brought with it a new brand of fatigue, making this latest lockdown one of the hardest yet.
Despite the constant extensions, some of our OC House member organisations have still got that spark of creativity that is keeping their teams connected and their morale afloat. One of our newest members, Conciliation Resources, are committed to keeping fresh ideas alive through regular Zoom catch ups.
“Since the beginning of lockdown, we have weekly social lunches,” Annalies Veldmeijer, Conciliation Resource’s Programme Support and Gender Officer, told me. “We take turns to choose a game, quiz or activity for us to do as a team, with strictly no work talk.”
Following the beginning of the pandemic when videoconferencing was a novel idea, people around the globe were beginning to feel exhausted after video meetings which prompted countless studies into the phenomenon now known as “Zoom fatigue”. One of the studies found that a strong method for combatting Zoom fatigue was to foster a sense of belonging with your team.
Dr Andrew Bennett who conducted the study for Old Dominion University in Canada was quoted as saying “…feeling part of the group really matters. When these employees had a high sense of belongingness with others on the meeting, they were much less fatigued afterwards.”
What better way to form a sense of community than through each member of a team contributing an idea, topic or theme that resonates with them.
“Last week, my colleague led us in 'campfire talks', with the noise of a fire playing, and everyone sharing a story from their lives,” Annalies said.
While Conciliation Resources are in one corner having Zoom D&Ms by a virtual campfire, data-driven organisation Neighbourlytics have a strict Wednesday ritual involving a dedicated two hours of board game time thanks to inventive team member, Alan Wright.
Using the website, BoardGameArena, the team jumps on every Wednesday afternoon to play classics like Uno and Yahtzee all from the safety of their own homes. The website has countless games and is free to access. “My only regret,” Alan said in relation to the team’s new weekly ritual, “is that I didn’t get it up and running sooner.”
Standard workplace operations have taken a hit too, with in-person meetings being replaced by tedious Zoom sessions. Neighbourlytics, however, have found that there hasn’t been a big impact to their productivity because of their Agile business model, which was designed to facilitate remote work and foster communication using daily stand-ups (quick meetings) and three-weekly retrospectives (team checkups).
When I spoke to Lively’s Paul de Freitas about maintaining productive interactions with his team, he’s found that “spicing up” his mediums of communication has kept him (and his colleagues) on their toes. “I've personally been rotating between different mediums when contacting teammates, to keep things spicy. Sometimes a video call, sometimes a classic phone call, sometimes an email, sometimes a chat message; and because it is harder to communicate with body language, been trying out a few more metaphors and analogies, even singing to express a point as clearly as possible.”
Aside from Paul’s foray in musical theatre, Lively, a not-for-profit organisation that employs young people to offer support and connection for older community members, has been setting up older community members with video conferencing so they can stay in touch during lockdown.
“We're doing a project at the moment where we are helping people who are usually taking part in social support groups to access the group virtually via Google Duo from tablets they've been given,” said Paul. “It keeps our younger people (Lively Helpers) busy with work helping older community members build resilience to lockdown isolation by picking up some tech skills.”
Aspergers Victoria has also shifted many of their programs online, offering special lockdown virtual events such as their Aspieland Moderated Minecraft sessions for teenagers, which employs older teens from the Aspergers community to help guide and support participants to build their Minecraft worlds, remind them about the sort of behaviour that is appropriate (if needed) and, most importantly, have fun using the online server.
Despite the ongoing barriers presented by perpetual lockdown extensions in Victoria, our members continue to build and maintain their communities through any medium possible. As organisations operating in the social sector, they’re still managing against all odds to keep the key aspects of “social” going strong regardless of physical distance.