11 Remote Workers on the Strategies They Use to Bond With Co-Workers
How to feel more connected when face-to-face interaction isn’t an option
The day-to-day life of remote work has its upsides. Your commute is the distance between your bed and your living room. You have privacy. You can wear what you want, eat when you want, and set up your desk how you want. In a way, it’s liberating.
But it’s also lonely. “I really love working remotely, but it seems like the relationships I have with my virtual peers are merely professional and nothing more,” says Déborah Andrade, the San Francisco-based vice president of communications for the Brazilian data warehouse SlicingDice. “I don’t feel my remote colleagues are as much a part of my life as they’d be if I worked with them in person.”
Right now, more people are staring down this tradeoff than ever before. Nearly 4 million U.S. employees — about 3% of the total U.S. workforce — work remotely most of the time, according to a report from the job search website FlexJobs. (That percentage increases to 43% when you factor in employees who work from home once or twice a week.)
Other research has found that remote workers made up about 16% of all white-collar jobs added to the economy between 2010 and 2017; in fact, on the job search…
