This labor day, the United States has the highest COVID-19 death toll of any country.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Who can forget the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and the phenomenon of Zoomboming? Many people cannot forget and they responded with lawsuits. The suits claimed that Zoom (ZM) enabled Zoombombing and was sharing personally identifiable information (PII) without proper notice.
TechCrunch defines Zoombombing as the disruption of Zoom calls by unapproved attendees. They would join a Zoom call and disrupt it by sharing offensive content. The content included using backgrounds to spread hateful messages, spouting slurs, anti-Semitism profanities, and pornography. Users of Zoom suffered these events during the first half of the COVID-19 lockdowns.
The frequency of Zoombombing prompted the FBI to issue a public warning about the cyber harassment. I wrote about the problems people were encountering with Zoom on the Bach Seat. Zoom was slow to respond to these threats. But eventually, they put additional security in place to reduce the frequency of Zoombmombing.
Zoom shared users personal data
Lawsuits in Florida and California accused the firm of sharing personal user data with third parties. Personal user data was sent to Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn. Motherboard reported that Zoom’s ‘Company Directory,’ feature was leaking leak personal information including email addresses and photos.
The Company Directory feature would automatically add other people to a user’s list of contacts if they sign up with an email address that shares the same domain. However, according to the report, multiple Zoom users say they signed up with personal email addresses, and Zoom pooled them together with thousands of other people as if they all worked for the same company. This exposed their personal information to unknown others.
In May 2021 the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California consolidated the many complaints into a single class-action suit. On 08/03/2021 Zoom agreed to settle the court case. It has proposed an $85 million settlement.
In the settlement, Zoom denied it violated any laws. They also questioned if users actually suffered injury or damages. The settlement would see customers receive a refund. Payment amounts are expected to average $34 or $35 for those who subscribed to Zoom’s paid version. Those who used the free version could get $11 or $12 based on estimates in court documents.
Zoom collected approximately $1.3 billion in subscriptions from paid subscribers according to the documents. Zooms’ lawyers called the $85 million settlement reasonable given the litigation risks. Zoom’s annual revenue quadrupled during the pandemic to nearly $2.7 billion. U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, CA is expected to finalize the settlement in October 2021.
CNet offers a FAQ on the Zoom settlement.
If you registered, used, opened, or downloaded the Zoom app for personal use (not through an enterprise or government account) between March 30, 2016, and July 30, 2021, you are potentially eligible for the refund from Zoom. This also includes people who signed up for Zoom’s free tier.
How much money could I get?
If you are eligible based on the date ranges above and you paid for a Zoom account, you could receive 15% of the money paid to Zoom for your subscription during that time or $25 (whichever is greater). If you are eligible but had a free Zoom account, you can claim $15. However, these rates may change depending on how many people file a claim.
If the settlement is approved at the October hearing, Zoom will provide available names, emails, addresses, and account numbers to the settlement administrator. Those that are eligible for a refund, will be notified by email or mailed postcard and asked to provide your name, mailing address, email, and claim number. If you’re not notified but think you are qualified, you can still file a claim by providing either an email associated with your Zoom account, a Zoom account number, or documentation showing that you were impacted. A new website (ZoomMeetingsClassAction.com) will have more information, but at the time of this writing was not yet live.
As part of the settlement, Zoom also said it would continue to take new measures to prevent Zoombombing, such as alerting people when hosts or meeting participants use third-party apps in meetings. They will offer (rb- but not mandate) specialized training to employees on privacy and data handling.
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Of course, you could also delete your zoom account. There is no way to use Zoom and not agree to their privacy terms. If you do use Zoom, you’re giving up a lot of your personal information. By deleting your Zoom account and no longer using the application, you’re stopping it from collecting your data.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
In the back of our minds, we had to know that it would end. After a year of working from home, employers have decided that the Covid-19 pandemic is over. Despite the increased productivity WFH has created, the bosses want us to return to the office. Many employees do not want to return to the office. Being forced to return to the office is creating stress and anxiety among employees.
Many employees have lingering worries about the virus. A survey released by the American Psychological Association found that 48% of vaccinated workers are uncomfortable with in-person interaction. Another return to the office concern is anti-vaxxer co-workers. After all, only 45% of U.S. residents have completed their vaccination A Harvard Business School survey found that 71% of workers would prefer to wait until everyone is fully vaccinated before returning to the office. More than half of those surveyed also still expect to social distance inside the office.
For many, the return to the office angst is the result of potential pandemic-induced changes to our brains. Normally, the amygdala region of the brain – that processes emotions, signals when a potential threat is present. Usually, the signal is tied to a negative emotion such as fear or anger, explained Crystal Reeck, an assistant professor at Temple University’s Fox School of Business. That triggers a fight-or-flight response. “Think about it as an alarm system,” she said. “It helps draw your attention to a threat in the environment.”
Ms. Reeck warns, that during the lockdown, the amygdala may have gotten rewired. Your brain may classify events like a co-worker coughing, or standing closer than six feet, or not wearing a mask as a threat. She explained, “That’s helped keep us safe when we were supposed to quarantine and maintain a social distance.”
To reduce your return to work angst, here are five tips to help you prepare physically and mentally for that psychologically jarring first week back at the office.
1 -Adjust your sleep schedule
Three weeks before returning to work, gradually adjust your sleep schedule. During the lockdown, many of us stayed up later to binge-watch the latest thing. No more binging, Go to bed earlier, so you can wake up earlier. We had the flexibility to roll out of bed five minutes before start time … no pants or shoes needed. Most workers have at least a 20-minute commute, plus a more appropriate grooming schedule, so leave yourself at least 40 minutes plus your commute time.
Why three weeks? Experts say that a new habit takes a minimum of three weeks to form. So go to bed a few minutes earlier in the evening. Then get out of bed a couple of minutes earlier in the morning. Increase the time every few days until you are back on the office schedule.
2 – Re-start your exercise routine
Many people gained the infamous 19 pounds during the COVID-19 pandemic. Restart your exercise routine at least three weeks you return to work. Don’t head back to the gym the first week back to the office. Week one is going to be traumatic enough. Healthcare professionals emphasize starting off slowly with moderate walking, swimming, or biking.
3 – Pajamas aren’t appropriate for the office, and you know it.
Freshen up your business appropriate wardrobe before you return to work. Business appropriate attire matters for two reasons: First, one team member’s sense of what’s appropriate can be far from others’ perception of the same. Second, studies over the years have demonstrated that wearing business-appropriate clothing reminds you to work in a business-like manner
In the coming weeks, put on your work shoes. Many of us have been living in Chuckie T’s or Crocs – no more. Wear your work shoes around the house to get used to them. Give then a good polish.
Get a haircut. Feel like you’re starting a new job.
4 – Take control of your health. Don’t expect your employer to care. Here’s a short list of things to do:
Bring your own water bottle and coffee mug. Wash them yourself to be sure it is clean.5 – Avoid Sharing Materials and Supplies
6 – Get vaccinated!
The vaccine protects everyone, including those who already got it and those who can’t get it due to medical reasons.
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Others believe bosses are just eager to regain tight control of their minions. The C-levels are setting deadlines to return to the office and threatening those that don’t feel comfortable going back into the office.
Only 5% of decision-makers surveyed believe remote workers are more productive, and 70% said employees in the office are more trustworthy.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Doing hard work is hard. Hard work can frustrate us and cause anxiety and stress. We can struggle to maintain focus on our hard tasks, including the ones we enjoy. We often postpone work on hard tasks. We often choose quick wins from easier tasks, like email, social media or watching videos. COVID-19 pandemic has made it even harder to get hard work done. Everyone experiences bouts of procrastination or work-avoidance, and the guilt that comes with not getting work done. There is no avoiding these experiences entirely.
David Badre, professor of cognitive sciences at Brown University published a book, On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done, about the neuroscience of cognitive control. Cognitive control is the mental function that allows us to connect our goals and plans with our actions. In the book he provides some suggestions to get hard work done.
To get hard work done, Professor Badre explains that the brain needs ready access to a task set. A task set is the information, plans, procedures, and knowledge you will use to get the hard work done. However, the task set is not instantly available. We can’t hold it all in our ‘working memory’, all the time.
For example, when planning a complicated project, we must collect lots of information related to schedules, budgets, resources, plans, stakeholders, and the results. However, if we have just been at a meeting on a Betty Jo’s retirement party, and then return to work on the project plan, the necessary information will not be in the forefront of your mind.
The project information must be mentally retrieved and organized in your working memory before you can start planning again. In practice, returning to a hard task in this way comes with the author calls a ‘restart’ cost. Restart costs are the time and mental effort spent getting back into your task set, rather than making progress. For this reason, it is important to create time and space to work on hard tasks.
Set aside large blocks of time – We all know how easy it is to fill our workdays with Zoom meetings, junk email and social media. These can leave only small gaps of time for getting hard work done. Long blocks of time are needed to get hard work done for several reasons. They require intense thought and work, but also because we need time to re-establish our task set. Switching frequently between tasks makes producing quality work harder.
Be consistent – The author suggests you should reserve a consistent time and place to get hard work done and be protective of it. Ideally, you should block this time and place every day. Even if you do not make progress one day, that time should be spent on your hard task rather than other tasks, even if it’s just reviewing your work.
Consistency aids memory. Memory retrieval is context dependent. It helps to have the same sights and sounds available when you learn something as when you try to remember it. Thus, working on a task in the same context repeatedly might aid retrieval and help us to re-establish our task set when we restart.
When you do two or more tasks at once, your performance efficiency and quality will suffer. This happens partly because each task occupies the working memory. As a result, they will compete for that shared resource and interfere with one another. When doing a hard task, it is important to minimize this interference from multitasking.
Remove cues to other tasks. It helps to put away e-mail, social media, and phones. Just seeing the phone on your desk, will distract you. They are distractions that pull you off task. The cues will create multitasking costs, whether you do the other tasks or not. Mr. Badre recommends, keep our space and time for hard work clear of other distracting tasks.
Beware of easy tasks. When you decide to perform a task, your brain does a cost–benefit analysis. Your brain will weigh the value of the outcome against the projected mental investment required to be successful. As a result, people often avoid hard tasks in favor of easier tasks. Sending some e-mails or straightening up the desk are worthwhile tasks and feel productive, but they add multitasking costs and prevent you from getting hard work done.
To get hard work done, you must structure the problem or task in a way that will allow you to succeed. For example, a hard task such as building a budget might involve a structured process of retrieving, selecting, and checking a set of facts from the general ledger, department budgets, corporate calendars policy and procedures. The better you know these facts, and the more effectively you can evaluate them and produce your project budget. As you do more budgets, they get easier to do. In general, you can get better at structuring hard problems with experience. This is one reason that practice makes us more efficient and successful getting hard work done, and that experts outperform novices.
Stay with it. Finding the right structure can take time. You may not make progress on a hard task every day, but it is important to keep trying. Be kind to yourself when you don’t make progress.
Be open to a change in plans. Often, your first plan does not work and leads to dead ends. When you get stuck, be willing to change your plan and look for new ways to address it.
Take breaks. It’s not helpful to insist on trying to get everything done at once. It is important to take breaks from difficult work. This keeps the mental costs low, and you can consider new ideas. Mr. Barde says there is evidence that incubation of this kind helps problem-solving.
Interact with others. Just like taking a break, interacting with others can help see a problem in a new way. Talking to people with diverse backgrounds, perspectives and viewpoints that differ from your own can be a powerful way to break out of a rut and make progress, as well as get some perspective. Moreover, working with others whose company you enjoy makes it more fun to get hard work done.
This social aspect of getting hard work done has been challenging during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has prevented the spontaneous interactions that are often helpful. Professor Badre suggests it is useful to make time for informal discussion over work, to recapture these interactions with others and avoid isolation.
Completing hard work is an essential part of success. Professor Barde concludes that there are no simple tricks or get-smart-quick schemes that will instantly make getting hard work done effortless. But, if you make space for our work, avoid multitasking and pursue good problem-solving strategies, can be more successful at getting hard work done.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
After a year of the COVID-19 pandemic and working from home until September 2021, video conferencing has become a fundamental part of everyday life. However, not everyone has overcome Zoom anxiety. Zoom anxiety is defined as “a feeling of panic when asked to jump on a video call.” For some people, the prospect of a video call can bring up a deep feeling of dread, especially if required to present. Combined with other stressors linked with the pandemic, lockdown and job insecurity, Zoom anxiety can prove debilitating to some people.
According to a study from presentation specialist Buffalo 87, “Zoom anxiety” has become a serious problem for many. Zoom anxiety afflicts people, for many reasons. James Robinson, Marketing Manager at Buffalo 7 says 73% of respondents reported struggles with Zoom anxiety, “…it’s clear that for many video calls bring their own set of challenges.”
The study published at TechRadar identified a number of reasons for Zoom anxiety. 83% of Zoom anxiety sufferers worried that a potential technical glitch that cannot be easily fixed might occur. They expressed concerns about holding up clients and colleagues, as well as revealing their incompetence. In addition:
67% worried about the inability to read body language effectively.A study out of Stanford University identified four reasons why so many people suffer from Zoom anxiety.
Emma Russell, a senior lecturer in occupational and organizational psychology at the University of Sussex explained. “We are attending to a number of faces staring right at us, and our face is also on-screen for all to see.”
Géraldine Fauville, a researcher at Stanford explains, “During video conferences, you have this impression that everyone on the screen is staring directly at you, so you have this feeling of being constantly the center of attention and that is just stressful in general, especially for long periods of time.”
The size of other participants’ faces is often large on our screen. Professor Fauville says, “ … Generally, if people are very close to each other, that’s a very intense situation that could lead, for example, to mating or conflict.”
Charlotte Armitage, a media and business psychologist, reports that being able to see ourselves causes Zoom anxiety. Being able to see ourselves causes Zoom anxiety because our reflection on-screen provides an added level of focus we wouldn’t have in real life. “The additional psychological processing involved in attending to one’s own behavior and actions … adds an additional level of stimuli that you wouldn’t have had in a face-to-face meeting.”
Professor Russell says, “It can be very draining to be paying attention to how people see us and how they view our reactions.“
During in-person meetings, people move around. Professor Fauville says that is not true during a Zoom meeting and it impacts outcomes. “Studies have shown that motion and movement are very important for creativity … for performance in general, so suddenly with video conferences, you are stuck in this box in view of the camera.”
Zoom meetings increase the “cognitive load” on participants. Video conferences require people to interpret virtual gestures and other nonverbal clues. Ms. Fauville says.
During face-to-face meetings, … we have a lot of ways to communicate … the intonation we use, the pauses we use in our sentences… information that most of us understand naturally … With video conferences, the only information I have about your body language is your head and your shoulder, so suddenly I have to second guess what you mean behind your words.
Here are some tips for Zoom users that feel awkward when asked to speak on camera, to reduce Zoom anxiety.
Limit calls
Video calls may not always be the most efficient option. Ask if this call is really necessary. It may be easier to add notes onto a shared doc, for example.
Cancel cameras
After starting the camera, use the “hide self” function. Bosses should be open to turning off cameras because of the stresses it can cause. Stanford’s Fauville suggests, “… using cameras only when it really adds something.” If your boss insists cameras are required on every call, try putting your camera on a side angle not face-on. You will focus less on yourself.
Allow recharge time
Limit the number of Zoom calls. If that won’t work for the boss try to get a break between calls to recharge. Failing those accommodations, Professor Fauville recommends shrinking the size of your video conferencing window so it’s not taking up your full screen. It can also be a good idea to periodically focus on something other than your screen. This way, she says, “You focus on what you hear, you don’t have to think about the body movement and so on.”
Give notice
Never drop anyone on a call without telling them in advance. If people have time to prepare, they’ll be more organised and less anxious.
Communicate concerns
Communicate! Talk to bosses, talk to teams – if there’s an issue, you never know who else is facing it too. Encourage conversations. Ask your boss for a private chat.
Move
Get up from your chair, stretch, water your plants, pet your dog or cat. Give your brain a chance to switch gears between meetings. Set up your camera further away from you. It will capture more of the room so you can stand, pace, or stretch without fear of going off frame.
An external keyboard can help you sit further away from the camera. Being further away can encourage movement as fidget during the call. It also puts more distance between you and your screen. This will decrease the intensity of the eye contact your brain perceives from other participants.
Focus on Physical Health
Dr. Hallie Zwibel, the director of NYIT’s Center for Sports Medicine recommends, “… an ergonomic chair, making sure your keyboard is ergonomically designed. We also recommend taking a standing break at least every 45 minutes.“
In addition, Dr. Zwibel recommends “Make sure you’re limiting glare, that your screen is eye level, with a certain amount of distance between you and your screen.”
Staring at a screen for hours on end can cause “pseudo-myopia,” meaning nearsightedness. It’s easy enough to avoid. Every 20 minutes, look away from the screen for 20 seconds at an object 20 feet away. (There’s are several apps for that.)
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For many of us, video calls are like standing up in front of the classroom. It’s just going to feel uncomfortable for that reason alone.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
