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
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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 site Indeed, the fourth most popular search term in 2017 was “remote/work from home.” And experts predict the popularity of remote work will only increase further over the next decade.
That’s a lot of employees potentially struggling to figure out how to connect with their virtual colleagues. Below, people who work remotely talk about what they wish they’d known before taking a remote position, the challenges they face as a remote worker, and how they develop relationships when face-to-face interaction isn’t an option.
Answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Find something you have in common.
I’ve been able to form friendships with a couple of my virtual coworkers simply by finding things we have in common. I even text one co-worker on evenings and weekends because she’s my workout accountability buddy. We typically text each other whenever we workout — and…
