Week 45 and it's starting to look like Lockdown 3.0 is just about working. There's a lot of lag on the data, but infection rates are starting to drop in England.
The number of hospitalizations is going up - this is still serious - but there is a quite logical lag-time there. In a few weeks, we'd expect to see that number drop too.
Meanwhile, we the people (I work with), have been told we're to work from home until the end of June.
That seems a long way off. I'm going to need a lot of courage to get through it, I think. I'm kind of fed up with this whole arrangement.
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There's an inventor out there who's come up with an idea: she's invented the Moodbeam, a device that managers can use to track whether their employees are happy or not. It's a wristband. Feeling good about life? Press the yellow button. Not doing so well today? Push blue. All the data is sent to an app that a manager can track to tell what the 'mood' is in their team.
I'm not sure it'll catch on. For one thing, most managers happen to be middle managers - mine certainly is; I'm five layers below the Big Cheese. If that is the case, an ocean of blue responses won't exactly persuade a mid-level manager to click a yellow themselves.
Secondly, half-decent managers ought to know that info anyway. You can tell from one-to-ones and checkins can't you? You can tell from the tone of an email, or the look on someone's face when they log into Microsoft Teams or Zoom. And you can probably tell a dozen other ways too - I'm not sure a colour-coded wristband is going to help.
I also like how it assumes there are only two moods: happy or sad. If there's any learning from lockdowns, it's that life can take you through complex emotions which are not resolvable into neat little categories. For example, right now, I really don't know whether I'd push yellow or blue. Come to think of it, I don't even know whether the wristband is asking me how I specifically feel about work. My life might be a yellow - it might not have anything to do with the very blue portion of time I spend answering emails and organizing the tech writing backlog.
The wristband itself would point me towards blue, and I bet I'm not alone. Who likes being monitored?
What they could do is show a sort of anonymised map of the Moodbeam results, but not just to the managers - I mean to everyone. That might do it. Would it look like an ocean of blue with spots of yellow, as I predicted? Perhaps. But then maybe if we all saw it, we'd realise we had an opportunity to start turning each other's blue responses into yellow ones? Would it prompt us to try to make the world happier? Or would it just show us that most of us are... fed up?
And if I believe that is the case anyway, moodbeam or not, shouldn't I be doing something about that, regardless of how I feel?
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