By SUSAN JONES
With nearly two-thirds of Pitt staff working partially or fully remote, one of the issues the Senate Mental Wellness Task Force wants to confront is the isolation that some people feel.
As of July 31, 2024, 5,332 individual have active Flexible Work Agreements. Of this total, approximately 21% are working fully remote and 79% are working hybrid schedules.
“We've been aware that even though it is convenient to work from home, after a time, people start to feel isolated and disconnected,” said Linda Tashbook, head of the task force, which is part of the Senate’s Benefits & Welfare committee. “They just don't know the gossip. They don't even have a context, sometimes, for the work that they're doing.”
She said that potentially some people have plenty of communication with their co-workers whether they’re remote or in-person, and “some people may not feel disconnected, but we know that a lot of people do.”
To address this, the task force will start hosting an Online Water Cooler event on Microsoft Teams for anyone at Pitt who is interested, whether they work fully remote or hybrid. The gatherings will happen at 1 p.m. every 15 days, starting Oct. 8. Those interested can sign up through a Qualtrics survey with a Pitt email.
The idea is to just have conversations, Tashbook said. “We have some thoughts about conversation prompts. We just don't want to be heavy handed to begin with. We want to give the participants opportunities to make this what is interesting and valuable to them.”
Nancy Briones, a member of the task force, said, “The idea was first born during the long, dismal winter months in my first year of fully remote work.”
Briones, who works as a financial analyst in the CFO’s office, said she looked for ways to engage in Pitt-related activities, but the time commitment needed to attend in-person events or meetings on campus was too much, “which made me feel even more removed from others in the Pitt community,” she said.
“One day, I reached out to a Pitt associate with whom I felt connected personally and mentioned feeling lonely at times in this fully remote role,” Briones continues. “She responded with such kindness and compassion, creating a virtual meeting which included two other associates that gathered once per week at noon aptly entitled, ‘Lunch with Friends.’ There were many times that we were not all able to join, but the light-hearted discussions we shared in those 30 minutes when we were able to get together were truly wonderful. … Being able to engage with others in the Pitt community within a friendly, casual virtual environment proved really good for my mental and emotional well-being. I hope that others find the same benefit from this new forum.”
Tashbook and Briones hope the Online Water Cooler will provide a forum for socialization, commiseration and information sharing.
“It could be commiseration about being alone,” Tashbook said, “but it could be commiseration about how hard it is to understand some of the communications that are only done in writing, and then you can't reach anybody by Teams when you're trying to have an actual conversation.”
The socialization aspect may substitute for that pool of people you regularly chatted with in the office about “keeping up with everybody's news and wanting people to know what's happening in your life.”
The program is for hybrid and fully remote workers, “because these same phenomena can be experienced by people who are working in a hybrid situation,” Tashbook said. “Maybe they have Wednesday at home, and that's the day of the weekly lunch meeting, or that's the one day that the assistant director is in, or whatever.”
The every 15 days schedule will mean that the Online Water Cooler will be on different weekdays each time, so more people will have an opportunity to join. If there is a large group who sign up, they may try to split people up into smaller gatherings with shared interests.
The other issues they’re concerned about is people bringing up issues that others don’t want to discuss or trying to monopolize the conversation. Tashbook and Briones will serve as facilitators to try to avoid that.
“We hope that folks will be aware that other participants might not want to hear or talk about heavy topics, such as politics or religion, or very personal issues in the middle of the workday during a break,” Tashbook said.
She said they also will be bringing in counselors from Life Solutions. “If we come to realize that folks really are dealing with significant loneliness, or maybe even mental health symptoms, and they just want some techniques for managing their mental wellness, we will bring in Life Solutions to do to talk with our group, and then participants will know that counselor and might feel more comfortable contacting them and scheduling private communications.”
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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