The WFH Folks

Every job I’ve had has similarly been a mix of locations with teams over multiple sites.

Working from home during the pandemic has been a natural extension of that.

You can build deep and meaningful connections with people online. You just need to approach it differently.

Look at entire gaming communities that do so despite never meeting.

Working apart from each other also doesn’t mean you can’t meet up outside work unless you truly live far apart. You can still socialize, but this time on your own terms instead of during work.

Anyway personally I haven’t felt a deterioration in connections. In fact I talk more often to my colleagues, and more importantly, to a wider range of colleagues than before.

I do however think different people have different aptitudes for online socialization. I do notice some people who were not terribly social at work, suddenly stop talking to anyone they don’t work with directly. And many people have issues not having face to face communication for context clues.

However I think this is totally subjective to the individuals, and having worked at multiple multi site companies, I think remote work can be much better for wide team building.

You can do away with the smaller cliques to some degree, disseminate information in easier to find locations and reduce tribal knowledge. People in other locations can be seen as equals to the ones local.

In fact when I worked in the office and supervised teams across multiple locations, I’d treat everyone on the team as remote when it came to most communication. Team chat rooms were encouraged instead of people coming by my desk unless needed. What I saw was that more people were aware of everything going on and were able to do better work as a result. I also found people who were too shy to ask questions were suddenly more able to ask them and have them answered because they saw the more confident individuals also asking things in the open chats rather than in person.

There are definite downsides to it all, but I find it really scales better in the long term

The real insight a lot of people have had is that they can work just fine with their remote colleagues without a manger needing to watch them. I'm sure most managers such as yourself aren't like that, but it only takes one in an org to really make people unhappy.

That said, for the last 40+ years, people have also been building relationships online, much stronger than usual office ones. And, for much of that period, it was without even the benefit of videoconferencing. Some of my closest friends are from various open source communities, for example, and I've only ever met about half of them in-person.

I think many companies haven't yet figured out how to provide fertile soil for distributed teams to bond. And I've heard of cases where employees try to do it organically, but their style is cramped by the company (e.g., mandated corporate communications tools that aren't amenable to this, keyloggers as part of "endpoint security" having people feel under surveillance, suspicions that video calls are recorded, culture and metrics/demands that don't permit genuine casual interaction time).

Another speedbump sometimes might be for people who've grown up with their in-person charisma/presence a part of how they interact, and haven't yet fully adapted to other modalities. Nobody is tall on webcam, but a lot of other human qualities are still important, and can be expressed and perceived.

And I reflected on that experience a decade ago realizing I put myself into solitary confinement - a prison punishment - and covid did that to billions of people who didn’t realize that social interaction is at the center of what gives us energy. So I deeply empathize.