It’s likely the novelty of working from home has started to fade, but follow these tips and you’ll make working from home not just comfortable, but enjoyable too! Buzz60’s Chloe Hurst has the story!
As author and Wharton School professor Adam Grant points out, “How are you?” rarely starts a meaningful conversation. “It prompts us to summarize our emotions instead of sharing the stories and insights behind them.”
The question falls particularly flat on Zoom, psychologist Jane Dutton says on the TED Ideas blog. “People are pretty tired of the same old ‘How are you doing?’ question.”
And if someone is actually suffering at the moment, the casualness of the question suggests you don’t really want to know how they are, forcing the other party to perform fake cheerfulness. Psychologists say this sort of “toxic positivity” has real mental health costs.
“How are you?” falls particularly flat on Zoom, says psychologist Jane Dutton.
Here are six more genuine and optimistic conversation-opening lines.
What surprised you this month?
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Grant says it’s better to ask about experiences than emotions, suggesting this offbeat opener as an example.
What did you do this week that you loved?
“Ask a question that taps quickly into something that’s meaningful to people and conveys, ‘I am genuinely interested, and I genuinely care,’” Dutton says.
What’s something you’re excited about?
Thrive Global rounded up alternative openers, and this one comes from Craig Inzana, a content creator from Omaha, who asked this even before the pandemic.
“It’s open-ended enough for someone to talk about their work, their favorite TV show or anything else that they’re loving at the moment,” he says.
What’s been keeping you busy?
“I’ve recently found that asking people more specific, but not intrusive, questions leads to a more authentic exchange,” Marta Chavent, a management consultant in France, told Thrive Global.
What have you learned about yourself lately?
California-based marketing director Isabelle Bart submitted this one to Thrive Global: “Not only have I realized that they usually open up and are willing to share personal stories, but they also get excited about sharing something positive related to personal growth.”
Tell me a silver lining that happened this week.
“Talking about silver linings acknowledges that something negative has happened, but it also touches on the positive that you’ve made of it,” Dutton says. She suggests this conversation opener for a big group Zoom call.
Zoom and other tech winners in 2020
Zoom was definitely one of the technology winners in 2020.
Winners
Nintendo Switch
Visitors to the Pax East conference in Boston play the Nintendo Switch video game Animal Crossing on Feb. 27, 2020.
Even in a year heralding splashy new consoles from Xbox and PlayStation, the Nintendo Switch was the console that could. Launched in 2017, the Switch became a fast seller. That was helped by the launch of the handled Switch Lite in September 2019.
In March, it became hard to find a Switch as people searched for ways to be entertained inside their homes. Boosting its popularity was the release of island-simulation game “Animal Crossing: New Horizons,” which debuted March 20 and has now sold a cumulative 26 million units globally, according to Nintendo.
According to the NPD Group, during the first 11 months of 2020, Nintendo Switch sold 6.92 million units in the U.S. It has been the best-selling console in units sold for 24 consecutive months, a record.
Zoom
Dancer-choreographer Netta Yerushalmy speaks to other participants on her computer during an April 2020 Zoom meeting dance rehearsal in her living room on the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York.
All video conferencing software from Microsoft Teams to WebEx thrived during the abrupt shift of tens of millions of people to remote working and schooling during pandemic. But only one became a verb.
Zoom Video Communications was a relatively unheralded company before the pandemic hit, but its ease of use let to wide adoption during the pandemic. There were some growing pains, including lax security that led to “Zoom bombing” breaches early on. The company revamped its security and remains one of the popular platforms to host remote meetings and classes.
Ransomware purveyors
The ransomware scourge — in which criminals hold data hostage by scrambling it until victims pay up — reached epic dimensions in 2020, dovetailing terribly with the COVID-19 plague. In Germany, a patient turned away from the emergency room of a hospital whose IT system was paralyzed by an attack died on the way to another hospital.
In the U.S., the number of attacks on health care facilities was on track to nearly double from 50 in 2019. Attacks on state and local governments were up about 50% to more than 150. Even grammar schools have been hit — shutting down remote learning for students from Baltimore to Las Vegas.
Cybersecurity firm Emsisoft estimates the cost of U.S. ransomware attacks in the U.S. alone this year at more than $9 billion between ransoms paid and downtime/recovery.
PC makers
After beginning the year grappling with exasperating delays in their supply chains, the personal computer industry found itself scrambling to keep up with surging demand for machines that became indispensable during a pandemic that kept millions of workers and students at home.
The outbreak initially stymied production because PC makers weren’t able to get the parts they needed from overseas factories that shut down during the early stages of the health crisis.
Those closures contributed to a steep decline in sales during the first three months of the year. But it has been boom times ever since.
The July-September period was particularly robust, with PC shipments in the U.S. surging 11% from the same time in 2019 — the industry’s biggest quarterly sales increase in a decade, according to the research firm Gartner.
E-commerce
An Amazon Prime logo appears on the side of a delivery van as it departs an Amazon warehouse location in Dedham, Mass., on Oct. 1, 2020.
The biggest of the bunch, Amazon, is one of the few companies that has thrived during the coronavirus outbreak. People have turned to it to order groceries, supplies and other items online, helping the company bring in record revenue and profits between April and June. That came even though it had to spend $4 billion on cleaning supplies and to pay workers overtime and bonuses.
But it's not just Amazon. The pandemic is accelerating the move to online shopping, a trend experts expect to say even after vaccines allow the world to resume normal lives. And thanks in part to shoppers consciously supporting small businesses, Adobe Analytics says online sales at smaller U.S. retailers were up 349% on Thanksgiving and Black Friday. At the more than 1 million businesses that use Shopify to build their websites, sales rose 75% from a year ago to $2.4 billion on Black Friday, according to Shopify.
