Is COVID a New Golden Age for Introverts?

The modern white-collar work, in many ways, is designed for the benefit of extroverts. Those who are happy to talk to many people fit themselves suited for essentially communicative roles, both external-facing, winning new businesses from potential clients, and internal, handling tricky relationships among colleagues. A service-oriented economy is fundamentally one where the engine of growth is greased by collaboration among people to get things done and fulfill customers' needs. In this world, introverts, many of them not fond of speaking to strangers, are more or less forced to be more communicative just to get ahead professionally.

In this world, introverts are forced to be someone they are not or remain professionally behind. To handle clients, introverts are compelled to become "situational extroverts" that put aside their aversion toward talking when the needs arise. For those who cannot put aside their aversion, they may be stuck with less client-facing positions, giving them less chance to bring in new businesses and thus, fewer opportunities to be professionally recognized. Blue-collar positions that require less communication, including factory and skilled trades like plumbers and electricians, are faster shrinking as a proportion of the global economy.

Of course, the fundamentals of the communication-based economy have not changed during COVID. Face-to-face meetings may be no more, but the need to speak to customers and colleagues to get things done remains very much the same. On Zoom and teleconference calls, it is still those who have talkative that have an edge. If anything, the lack of a face-to-face component, which allows for non-verbal cues to pass through, gives extroverts a further edge. As more communicative becomes strictly vocal, companies may become even more dependent on those who are better and more fond of speaking to maintain relationships with clients and among coworkers.

But beyond the strict need to keeping communication going, introverts may have an advantage that they did not enjoy in the pre-COVID era. The world of remote working is one where the boundary between when communications happen and when they do not are made much clearer. Whereas the office environment subtly encourages employees to communicate spontaneously over the water cooler and lunch sessions, working at home has no such considerations. People are either talking to each other for meetings, or they are not outside meetings. There are no in-between situations when they casually cha without an explicit purpose.

That lack of spontaneous conversation may be difficult for extroverts in ways that introverts cannot relate. Those who are energized by constant talks with others will find themselves increasingly depressed by the prospects of unending work at home, where they cannot share small chats with people as the situation emerges. Introverts, on the other hand, enjoy that lack of distractions. Their preference to not be bothered during the workday for random chats so that they can focus on their work is so perfectly fulfilled when they are alone in their home with their laptops.

The fact that introverts handle working alone at home better than extroverts may in the long term make companies more dependent on the former. Given that, at least in some parts of the global economy, there is no immediate to send everyone back to the office, those who are more tolerant of working at home will stick around the company longer. Extroverts, depressed from being alone in a room, may get increasingly fidgety, looking for those very few career opportunities that allow them to be around other people at all times. For cautious companies that want to continue keeping people at home, that could mean more resignations among their extroverted employees.

As more extroverts quit and introverts stick around, the way companies do communication may also evolve. As fewer and fewer extroverts remain in the company, the maintenance of relationships through constant verbal communication, favored by extroverts, will no longer function. An introvert-majority workplace will depend less on talking and more on more infrequent written communication. Coworkers will work much more independently of one another, and clients may be put at more arms lengths than they currently are. As sparser communication becomes more of a corporate norm, the negative repercussion, for sales and employee morale, of less communication may disappear over time.

This does not mean extroverts will play less of a role in communication within and beyond a company. Their verbal skills continue to make them valuable as connectors of individuals and opportunities. But prolonged work from home has taken a much larger toll on extroverts than introverts, which may, in turn, cause extroverts to be less stable employees. Facing higher churn of extroverts, companies need to restructure how people interact so that they can depend more on their remaining introverted employees to do more of the tasks extroverts used to handle.