Remote Work - Fighting Loneliness on Remote Teams - Sun and Planets Spirituality AYINRIN

 Remote Work - 

Fighting Loneliness on Remote Teams - Sun and Planets Spirituality AYINRIN

Jimena Roquero/Stocksy

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Summary.   

Remote work offers many benefits, but the lack of community – compared to in-person environments – can cause some workers to feel isolated and lonely. These feelings can impact job performance, sometimes significantly. This article will share four evidence-based strategies that leaders and managers can use to build community in their remote teams. These strategies include reflecting on what’s working for your team, recognizing your team in a meaningful way, providing support for career development, and communicating with your team as a whole person. Building a community in a remote environment requires innovation and intention, but getting started only takes one act.close

Remote work, as many of us know, can be isolating. That isolation often leads to feelings of loneliness, which can cause employees stress and significantly impact their job performance. Absenteeism attributed to stress and loneliness costs U.S. employers an estimated $154 billion annually, according to a 2022 article published in the Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance. Loneliness and isolation have had such a widespread impact on society over the last five years that public health officials have declared the situation an epidemic. Central to this crisis is a lack of community.

The Stanford Social Innovation Review defines community by recognizing what it is and isn’t:

Community is not a place, a building, or an organization; nor is it an exchange of information over the internet. Community is both a feeling and a set of relationships among people. People form and maintain communities to meet common needs.

As an advisor and coach, I’ve seen how the sense of community can benefit an organization. I once worked with a global remote company with approximately 3,000 employees, many of whom enjoyed the flexibility of remote work. Still, the data and observations showed a common need: to foster a greater sense of safety, respect, and care through community. It’s clear that community is an antidote to loneliness.

Inspired by my work with this company, and others, this article will share some of the evidence-based strategies and approaches that leaders, managers, and employees under the umbrella of Talent, People, or Culture can explore to build community in a remote environment.

Remote workers experience three types of virtual distance: physical, operational, and affinity. Leaders and managers may have less influence on the first two types. Physical distance refers to employees who work in different time zones and geographies. Operational distance refers to the tools, policies, or procedures that may inhibit successful collaboration, such as poor virtual connections, ineffective workflows, or miscommunication. The third type of distance, affinity distance, refers to the quality of connection among coworkers. This makes it well within a leader’s sphere of influence. That is why this article focuses on building community by enhancing the quality of connection among remote coworkers.

Research confirms high-quality connections can be made in small ways, including respectful engagement, support, trust, and playfulness. The four practical strategies I discuss below, which I’ve used in my work, support this research.

1. Reflect on where your team stands right now 

As a starting point, I recommend reflecting on your team’s potential to thrive in remote environments and build connections. Consider your team and their connections in the framework of risks, respect, and relationships with remote work.

Risks

I’ve heard employees say that forming human connections can be risky: there’s a risk of exclusion, or being ignored or judged, all of which feel heightened in remote work. Reflect and consider where your team may stand in terms of barriers to making connections. If anyone on your team has stated they feel like there’s a risk to making connections, your first step as their leader is to determine whether the risk is real or perceived. Real risk is based on something that has happened, while perceived risk is internal and possibly based on an employee’s negative thought patterns. Regardless of why the risk is there, empathetically address it so your employees feel safe and so they can trust that work can be a place of community.

Respect

Time is one of our most precious commodities — it should be respected. Wasting it drains energy and dampens motivation, giving employees less time to do enjoyable and meaningful work. According to a 2023 PwC report, CEOs perceive major inefficiencies across routine activities like decision making, meetings, and emails — viewing roughly 40% of the time spent on these tasks as inefficient.

As well as time, displaying respect for the individuals on your team will help foster a stronger sense of community. Employees often cite feelings of disrespect when managers take credit for their ideas, form a habit of talking over them in meetings, or micromanage them in a way that undermines proven capabilities.

As you reflect on any roadblocks in your journey to building community, think about whether you may have broken respect around your employees’ time or emotions. If you uncover any instances, make it a goal to express a meaningful apology and, if necessary, show how you are rethinking your behavior and practices to facilitate change.

Relationships with remote work

Lastly, reflect on each of your employees’ relationship with remote work. Specifically, ask yourself:

1. What may make remote work challenging for them? They may identify as having an extroverted personality or a small social circle, so work has typically provided an opportunity for them to connect with people directly.
2. How long have they worked remotely? They may have learned examples of what does and doesn’t work well for them as a remote worker. By sharing these examples, the team can build a greater sense of shared support.
3. Have they worked at more than three remote companies? Being able to compare what it’s like to work at different remote companies may offer good/better/best insights for strategic planning and assist you in your community-building efforts.

2. Make recognition meaningful

It was over a decade ago, but I still vividly remember a manager who did a great job celebrating personal and professional wins. He would rally the team on occasion and we’d walk over to a quaint confectionery.

In remote environments, where there’s physical distance and employees may be spread across the country or globe, there aren’t as many opportunities to engage in in-person celebrations like dinner or afternoon treats. Employee recognition programs — including thank-you notes, milestone celebrations, and employee-appreciation events — can help provide opportunities for remote teams to celebrate and for leaders to help embed recognition into the company culture.

At its core, recognition is a signal of value and gratitude for one’s work. Recognition makes employees feel good and part of something meaningful. The business impact of recognition is significant, too.

According to data from the employee recognition platform Achievers:

• Three-quarters (73%) of workers say recognition would inspire them to be more productive.
• Two-thirds (64%) of workers say recognition would reduce their desire to job hunt.
• More than half (54%) of workers say recognition would reduce the impact of having a salary below their expectations.

Sometimes, remote teams don’t feel that recognition is as “public” as it would be if they were in an in-person environment. Virtual quarterly town hall meetings, monthly virtual team meetings, or annual in-person company retreats are all potential opportunities to make recognition more public. But, the best way to build community with recognition is to ask your employees how they would like to be recognized. You can also lessen affinity distance and make recognition more meaningful by acknowledging the following details:

1. What did they do? This highlights and reinforces valuable behaviors and skills.
2. What did you experience? This adds an element of storytelling and makes your recognition more memorable and personalized.
3. What was the impact on the company and team? This can help show the employee how their efforts and accomplishments align with the company’s goals.

3. Provide support for career advancement

According to the Foundation for Social Connection, managers’ interactions with direct reports are among the most powerful influencers of employee well-being. And when you enhance the well-being needs of your employees, you enhance the sense of community overall. Yet, data by INTOO and Workplace Intelligence shows a low percentage of employees have formal (34%) or informal (30%) conversations with their manager about their career either once a year or never. But more than half (53%) of employees — and 62% of Gen Z — would like to talk about their career with their manager more often.

The same study shows 79% of employees want organizational mentorship or coaching opportunities. Yet, research by Deloitte shows that Gen Z and Millennial employees express difficulty finding mentorship/sponsorship opportunities when working remotely. Take job shadowing, for example. This experimental learning method takes a different form in a remote environment because there’s no on-site observation. As a leader of a remote team, you can help satisfy your employees’ curiosity by taking a few minutes in a one-on-one meeting to show them a project or task you’re working on that would be of interest to them. As an added bonus, when you share your work with others, you invite diverse perspectives and questions that can help refine and challenge your ideas and rationales.

A monthly virtual “lunch and learn” is another great way to create exposure for other roles and deepen your remote team’s appreciation for and connection with employees across the company. Cross-functional projects, where employees take on tasks outside of their area of expertise, is another popular method of career development that can be done remotely. Take caution, though, to be sure these projects aren’t added on top of already heavy workloads.

Other forms of career support and community building for remote teams include coordinating skill-based learning sessions presented by external experts, publicizing industry conferences, announcing workplace events associated with significant days like World Mental Health Day, or hosting an internal podcast where people discuss what inspires them in their work and life.

Ensure career and mentorship opportunities are varied, so that your team members can pursue those that best align with their needs and styles.

4. Model communicating as a whole person

According to the 2023 U.S. Surgeon General’s “Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community, “workplaces can foster a sense of inclusion and belonging among their employees by creating cultures and practices that encourage people to connect with one another as whole people, not just as skill sets. Here are three ways you as a leader can model communicating as a whole person with your remote team:

Re-frame your response to the question “How are you?”

In virtual meetings, instead of responding to the “How are you?” question with a typical, flat response like “Good, and you?” use the opportunity to highlight your work and life. You could say something like: “I’m well, thanks. Just finished wrapping up [a project or task],” or “I’m excited to be working on [a project or task you’re proud of], and this evening I’m dabbling in my love for [what you’re doing for fun, as a hobby, or for self-care and why you enjoy it]. How’s life for you?”

Work and life can easily intertwine — this style of communication allows you to address both. It’s important for your employees to realize you’re well-rounded and have a life outside work, too.

Infuse opportunities for friendship into meetings

Gallup’s research found a sign of friendship at work is the amount of time that employees talk about unrelated work topics. Friendships are built when we dedicate time for connection, and that can start in meetings with an agenda or in meetings where the entire format is an open-ended question-and-answer. Tools like Airspeed can help strengthen the operational and affinity distance, providing an array of fun icebreakers that auto-populate in Slack or a mobile app.

Talk about mental health

Mental health is a growing concern across demographics, generations, and work models. As a leader, you have the power to create an environment where people feel safe talking about mental health at work. Here’s a practical example of a message a leader might send to their team:

Hi team,

You may have already gotten a sense of this, but creating a safe and strong community where it is OK to be vulnerable is essential to me, just like it is for you. I’ve been struggling with [opportunity for transparency]. Did you know we have [benefit that you can use for support]? Here’s [link] where I found it.

The power here is in the follow-up. At the next opportunity, discuss your message and continue the conversation around mental well-being.

 . . . 

Building a community in a remote environment requires innovation and intention, but getting started only takes one act. When followed through, the process and outcomes are transformative and rewarding from the standpoint of preventing burnout and impacting the bottom line, elevating the employer brand, and knowing that you made a difference in someone’s life. There is far too much at stake for individuals and corporations to hope in building communities by happenstance.

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