I'm seeing this in personal experience. Interns and juniors are just totally lost between Zoom meetings. They don't have the confidence to jump into busy work chats.
> They don't have the confidence to jump into busy work chats.
Have you had the time to do anything to assist? Have you brought this up with the folks who should be mentoring or managing these people? Mentoring is still mentoring, whether or not one happens to be breathing the same air as the fellow one is mentoring.
IME one HUGE benefit of moving what would be one-off watercooler chats to one-off chats in a '#watercooler' channel (or whatever) is that one no longer has to be on-site and socially connected in order to get most of the benefits of the rumor mill. Making all that side chatter searchable across the whole company does WONDERS for cross-team functionality and awareness.
Of course there's mentoring 2-3 times per week. The rest of the time they're just staring at their screens trying to figure out wtf is going on.
People don't feel confident jumping in to a chat stream. In real life you see a newbie standing around and a normal human tries to actively include them and explain things. Nobody looks at the thousands of idle chat handles and tries to explain what's going on to all of them.
That’s on the more senior workforce, and especially their managers to fix. Their incompetence to do so shouldn’t be solved by worsening the working conditions.
Yes, but it's a huge strain on senior workforce. A summer intern becomes a curse where no work gets done because you're trying to actively include digitally what's being done for free via office osmosis.
