Remote work got you feeling isolated? Here’s what to do about it.

Human beings tend toward the tribal. And while there are downsides to our tribal tendencies (2020, I’m looking at you), the need to belong and the ability to categorize people and groups into “us” and “them” also serves us well. If we can’t identify ourselves as ‘a part of this group’ and ‘not a part of that group,’ then family, social ties, team sports, and pretty much anything else that requires human cohesion in order to thrive is quite thoroughly out the window. That the company you work for had the resources to hire you in the first place is, at the most basic level, thanks to its members capacity to share a vision and work together to achieve goals. If you don’t feel a certain amount of connection with the team, it will eventually become difficult to care about the company’s vision or the work necessary to bring it to fruition.

All of that is to say this: If you struggle with feeling disconnected from your remote team, that’s not a frivolous issue. It’s a legitimate problem that deserves solutions. But those solutions encompass more than just facilitating the connection you’re looking for; they also include recognizing and taking advantage of the opportunities isolation presents.

In other words, when working remotely, you get the added benefit of isolation from coworkers along with the uncomfortable lack of connection with them that the isolation tends to bring. These are two related-but-separate things. One is a plus; one is a minus. Only by leveraging the former and remediating the latter can you alleviate the discomfort. If you only focus on the second of those two things, you’ll miss out.

How to make use of remote work isolation

Isolation in the context of remote work simply means to work apart from others. As a remote worker, I work in isolation from the other members of my team. That is by and large a good thing. Here’s why: The peripherals of work are stripped away.

Take away corporate dress codes, parking spaces, offices/cubicles/desks, breakrooms, conference rooms, ID badges, and nameplates along with all the obligatory, surface-level socialization that a shared physical workspace engenders, and what are you left with? Work. The actual down-to-business stuff we were hired to do. That is inarguably positive for anyone whose professional goals are dependent on the honing of their craft. Nobody’s skill set is sharpened or expanded by cake in the break room.

Your work product matters more when working remotely because the distractions are gone. And because the distractions are gone, you can focus more on producing stellar work. See that? Isolation is a gift. It offers you the chance to reallocate cognitive resources from peripheral concerns to the solutions you were hired to provide, and it ensures that those solutions—not how well you dress or how charming you are—form the basis of your work’s value to your company. Leverage that!

FOCUS 👏 ON 👏 THE 👏 WORK

Without isolation, we’d all have to do annoying, unrelated-to-work things like find a new shampoo because our fave makes Nancy in accounting sneeze, wear uncomfortable clothes because “leggings aren’t pants,” and quit eating egg salad for lunch because it makes the breakroom stink. But none of that matters when you don’t share a workspace with others. Which means that you don’t have to worry about it; you can just work.

“But wait,” you might say, “sometimes I want cake in the breakroom. I want a few feel-good moments with my coworkers now and then, some bonding time. Otherwise all that focus on work starts to feel like a lonely slog.”

Indeed. You want connection. But what if I told you that those feel-good moments aren’t the only way to create it? That, in fact, they aren’t even the best way?

Connect remotely... through the work

As I write this, there are remote workers all over the U.S. (the world?) attending virtual holiday office gatherings and “connecting” with each other.

Despite the shade I’m really honestly trying not to throw (it just sort of overflows), it’s likely that at least some attendees truly do feel more connected to their coworkers at these shindigs. But what about when you’re back at your kitchen table or couch or whatever workspace you’ve carved out for yourself at home? What about your day-to-day? The connection credits from a drunken gingerbread making party on Zoom don’t transfer to everyday operations. If you have to socialize in order to feel connected and a part of a cohesive team, what happens when the party’s over?

Instead, connect with each other through the work. Here’s how:

• Get cross-functional
  Rather than developers coding and designers designing and sales selling, cross-functional teams work collaboratively to take their product to the next level, everyone bringing their expertise to the table, sharing ideas and inspiration. (Tip: The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim can help you out here.) Even if your company doesn’t support formal, cross-functional teams, you can bring cross-functionality into your professional life by seeking out input from other departments. If you work in marketing, for example, try to build rapport with the sales staff and the product team. It will take time, but your efforts here will pay dividends not just in better, more finely-tuned marketing initiatives, but also in your decreased sense of workplace isolation. Get out of your bubble. It will pay off, I promise.
  

• Bring back Show-and-Tell
  Milestones matter. It’s a mistake, I think, to land the feature/campaign/what-have-you, breathe a sigh of relief, and keep moving. Teams deserve and maybe even need a little time to share their work, talk a bit about the obstacles they encountered, and answer colleagues’ questions. Imagine that on Zoom—your coworkers on XYZ product team walking through the new feature they just shipped, showing off their design sketches, their code, the feature’s functionality, and what they learned in the process. Isn’t that better than virtual karaoke?
  

• Start meetings with water cooler chat
  Here’s how this could work: If the meeting starts at 9am, the host shows up at 8:55am, and so does anyone craving an extra dose of connection. Those five minutes before the meeting starts are for the sort of casual conversation that happens in hallways and break rooms at co-located workplaces.
  

• Pay attention to how you feel and what you need
  We work asynchronously by default. This mostly works quite well for me. But sometimes I get in the weeds on a project, and I begin to feel lonely, like I’m toiling away by myself and just venturing further and further out. And oh, look, it turns out the weeds lead to a swamp, whoops! And not just any swamp—it’s the Swamp of Sadness from The Neverending Story. Next thing you know I’m sinking deeper and deeper, trying desperately to drag myself out, and feeling pretty sorry for myself. (This is only a mild exaggeration.) At these times, I need help getting out of the swamp. And a real-time, voice-to-voice conversation about the problem with a coworker generally does the trick—but I have to ask for it. That’s one of the gifts of isolation: you learn to advocate for yourself, to proactively seek out the degree of connection you need.

Use isolation to your advantage

If you approach remote work as if the only difference between working from home (or the coffee shop, park, airplane, whatever) and working in a co-located office is that you’re not physically in said office, you might inadvertently intensify the unique challenges of working remotely, challenges like feeling isolated from your teammates—off on your own island and disconnected from the company for which you work. Remote work is inherently different from working in a co-located office. You kind of are off on your own island, and there really is a certain amount of disconnection involved in working that way. But there are ways to remediate the disconnection. And, frankly, there are benefits to both the isolation itself and the ways in which you adjust your approach to work in order to achieve the connection you’re missing. So if you’re feeling isolated, take heart; you can use this to your advantage.

“Perfer et obdura, dolor hic tibi proderit olim. (Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.)”

— Ovid

Photo by arash payam

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