How Remote Workers Make Work Friends

You can learn about someone by seeing what objects they have sitting in front of them all day. Some offices may have rules about your background, but if yours allows for some personalization, consider that. Pizzica has had plenty of conversations with fellow team members that started because of something she or they noticed about their background. A quick follow-up message is the perfect way to transition that random comment from a meeting into a long-term conversation (and maybe friendship). Even the introverts among us have a need for some type of human connection at work.

• This will help your employees get on board with the shift back to in-person work.
• There’s no goal other than to just connect and chat about non-work things.
• It may be helpful to pilot ideas before implementing them fully.
• People naturally gather around the coffee machine/water cooler and chat.
• Even better, you can use lots of these tips for remote or in-person teams.

Here are some steps you can take to build workplace friendships and reap their considerable rewards. To make friends with your colleagues, you’re going to need to let your guard down a little bit. You don’t need to share deep secrets, but you should try to make interactions about more than just work. Give them their space, and consider connecting with colleagues who are more public and open to interacting on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and beyond. That colleague who’s always sharing recipes and photos of the gorgeous meals they make on their personal blog will probably appreciate your likes and comments on their posts. Working remotely doesn’t have to be a solitary endeavor, especially now that more people are doing it and getting comfortable connecting with one another online using a variety of tools and apps.

Find Your Co-Workers On Social Media

While you can’t encourage them to meet up at a coffee shop right now, you can schedule virtual coffee breaks with your team to stay connected while working from home. Slack, Zoom, and other online collaboration tools have made working from home a more social affair than ever. If you’re lucky enough to have an employer who organizes virtual parties or happy hours, make every effort to attend. Just talking about it can open up the opportunity to socialize and make a friend at the virtual office.

It’s important that companies create an environment where leadership and employees can stay connected while working from home. Just because you can’t get to the on-site company gym is no reason not to stay in shape. You can do yoga, chair stretching, or even a meditation session to keep everyone fit and healthy. Just because you’re not in an office doesn’t mean you have to skip out on some “well-loved” traditions. Have the annual Ugly Sweater Contest or Halloween Costume Contest. For something a little less holiday-related, try a “craziest coffee mug” or “funniest pet moment” contest.

Give Them Time To Adjust

Meeting online is a great way to stay connected while working from home. However, sometimes there’s nothing like getting a package or letter in the mail. YourYour colleagues who have hobbies like blogging or cooking will love https://remotemode.net/blog/tips-on-how-to-make-friends-when-you-work-from-home/ it when they see a thumbs-up from you on their social media. This can be a great way to motivate them and yourself to stick with their hobbies, create a better work-life balance, and build better bonds with colleagues.

“The increasing use of technology and rise of virtual work has fundamentally changed how employees interact with each other,” the researchers wrote. Small interactions can build up over time, and make it easier to reach out to the coworker you’ve discussed Succession with when you want to ask a question about their team’s work. But a big part of what’s still missing is the emotional piece—that ineffable digital experience that can replicate the feeling of presence we can only seem to get offline. It’s why, as cities and workplaces increasingly open up, finding that balance between the physical and virtual will be key. In the absence of better tools, the chance to meet and see our colleagues again will almost certainly make the virtual side of our relationships stronger than if they were virtual all the time. Cox says finding and cultivating workplace friendships may require some trial, error and discovery when it comes to what works — and what doesn’t.

Turn It Into A Shared Adventure

As long as it’s something that gets people involved, entertained, and engaged in something fun for a few minutes, it’s bound to be a hit. You’ll probably get some interesting answers and learn a lot about your team in the process. The benefit here is that everybody doesn’t have to be online at the same time for this to work.

In one 18-month study of a Fortune 500 technology firm with a largely remote workforce, researchers found that virtual teammates faced significant barriers to developing friendships. This is a problem, as we’ve known for some time now that having friends (at work and at school) makes us more engaged, more productive, and more satisfied in all areas of our lives. Not having an in-person office environment doesn’t mean you can’t still have a lunch date or coffee chat to catch up or get to know someone better. Meet-and-greet video calls are especially helpful if you’re new to a job or to a team. People like those colleagues who make an effort to build better communication with their peers.

Ideas for Making New Friends While Working from Home

We conducted 114 interviews with 64 different people (we interviewed some people 3+ times). The people we interviewed worked remotely at least 50% of the time, with many working remotely % of the time. We also spent more than 75 hours observing how Cloudly employees interacted with each other when they happened to be together in-person.

• A marketplace where current and aspiring remote workers find new job opportunities and up-skill with online courses.
• If your team is planning a virtual team-building game session, we would advise you not to miss it and use this opportunity to interact actively with your remote team.
• However, a friendly relationship with them is vital to perform better while working from home.
• This will minimize the back and forth and ensure you actually get some time to meet them.

Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses. If your organization has any clubs, groups, or committees, now’s the time to get involved. We all love to poke fun at icebreaker activities, but they’re still around for a reason.

How Owning a Pet Can Benefit You When Working Remotely

You can avail the full benefit of such events by not missing them. A remote worker cannot build such communication because they lose the ability to make friends due to a lack of social interaction. In some cases, if you compare their work friends vs. real friends, they are failing on both sides because they don’t know how to make friends while working in virtual teams. Many companies offer telecommuting as an option, but still, provide a dedicated workplace to come into should employees choose to do so—and seriously consider doing so! Dividing your workweek between time in the office and time at home will help you get valuable face time with your coworkers, and help you strengthen and maintain those important workplace friendships. When working remotely, the researchers found it was far harder for people to build friendships at work, which had a knock-on effect on their performance, too.

When tele-commuting, it is often easy to
neglect personal relationships because discussions about work take priority. Try to broaden the daily and weekly discussions to include topics such as new
movies, current events, music, and even family life. Even though it is not
always possible to replicate an office environment, you can get pretty close by
incorporating these kinds of discussions, even when the main topic is still
work-related. But how do you go about making friends when you’re tele-commuting? While the task is not very easy, the good news is that is it possible to stay in touch and have fun. With a little bit of creativity, you might even forget that you’re not in the same office as the rest of the team.

Nowadays, she writes mostly about travel, money, and career management for a variety of publications. She is the founder of Travel with Meena, a travel site working to center the stories of travelers of color. Meena has worked as an editor and newsroom leader for several major media companies and coaches women journalists through the Digital Women Leaders media coaching program. If someone isn’t interested in chatting about anything beyond the project at hand, give them space and introduce yourself to another colleague. Marisa Franco, Ph.D., was previously a professor at Georgia State University, where she became an academic expert on friendship. She currently works as a policy fellow at Millenium Challenge Corporation.