Keeping remote workers close to the action

Five years ago today, after the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic, there was a widespread shift to remote work for many workers who were considered nonessential. And people had to get used to seeing their colleagues mainly on a screen.

In recent years, some companies have required employees to return to the office full time. But remote work remains a major part of many people’s lives, far more than in 2019.

Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Anita Blanchard, a professor of psychological and organization science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, about what’s lost when workers don’t interact in the same physical space.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Anita Blanchard: First of all, personal connections and friendships at work. I think it’s interesting that we know that conflict always happens in groups, but if the group has a stronger social connection, if they trust each other more, the conflict has less of a negative effect on the group performance than if they don’t. And I am concerned that for groups that are all online and don’t have social connections, this normal conflict is going to have a more negative effect on the group. And also, the communication and informal interactions between groups are missing because if you’re only meeting with your group online, and you’re never meeting with other people, but you haven’t had those opportunities to gossip and figure out what’s important and who you should trust and who you should not trust. Also, you’re not sharing information about what you’re doing, what your work is, with someone else who’s doing a different project and making connections that could be a creative problem-solving opportunity.

Stephanie Hughes: There are a lot of great things about remote work in terms of work-life balance. Aside from that, are there positive effects it’s had on the way we work?

Blanchard: Yes, we know that it helps with pollution and congestion. If people are working remotely, that’s also very positive. And, of course, work-life balance. We’ve got some meta-analyses that show that working from home improves productivity. So it’s not, I know that managers, when the pandemic first started, they wanted to see people sitting at their computers. That’s not really the benefit of being face to face. That comes from the informal communication, the relationships that are built up, and actual focused performance is better at home when you’re able to just look at your computer and get the work done.

Hughes: The informal interactions that might have been distracting me from my work are not happening, and so …

Blanchard: I know, it’s ironic that the informal interactions are the part that are so good for keeping people connected emotionally to the organization, for spreading information about norms of the group and making connections and information that’s being shared. That’s really important, that’s really what the face-to-face, at-the-office interaction should be facilitating.

Hughes: Is there any advice you have for young people who are just starting out in a setting that’s mostly remote, and maybe for Marketplace? We are in separate geographies, which is another, added challenge.

Blanchard: So we’re looking at online groups, both established groups and new groups, and we’re looking at their, I call it “relationship building,” by understanding how they’re similar and their social interactions, as well as their task-focused interactions and their shared goals. And we’re finding that for new groups — and I would assume new employees who are starting with new groups — you really need to focus on developing those social interactions. That is what drives good performance and good connection to the group. And in fact, we were surprised to find out that focusing on task and goals early on in the group decreased performance, decreased connection to the group. So getting a social connection when you are first starting is extremely important, but for the more advanced groups, once they have that base set up, then you’re OK for focusing on work tasks and focusing on the goals you want to have together.

Hughes: How are we different as workers than we were five years ago, with this — not all of us — but a lot of us have had a giant dose of remote work in that time.

Blanchard: I’m hearing it anecdotally, and I’m seeing a little bit of this empirically. I think that for Americans in particular, I think we realized how much work was part of our identity, and I think that we’re learning that perhaps work is still very important, but so is life. Work is not the most important thing in our lives, and perhaps we need a little better balance. I’m hearing that a lot from my students, as well as my more seasoned colleagues, that that’s what they have discovered.

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In terms of forging connections with remote co-workers, Blanchard suggests using an icebreaker question.

One she likes is, who cried this week?

I have a tip of my own that I’ve gathered over the years. It’s to log in to Zoom meetings a little early. That way you can just chat with folks before you get down to official business. If I need a question to get things going, I like to ask: What’s something you’ve eaten recently that was awesome?

Because I genuinely want to know. And if it was so good that it made you cry, so much the better.

Do you have tips for connecting with remote colleagues? Let us know at [email protected].

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