I've been working from home the last couple of months due to the Covid-19 lockdown. In the beginning, it was great. Being able to wake up and pretty much start working 5 minutes later, having my own kitchen/toilet close by, etc. However, I quickly started to miss the small everyday interactions with my co-workers.
That made me wonder, what solutions do you have in place to compensate for the social aspect of working in an office?
For example, while not perfect, I have found that just starting a call with a colleague without anything specific to talk about feels better than just hacking away on my own.
At home we FaceTime people we normally drink beer together and do it remotely. Two or three families in a videochat. We even attended an all-remote wedding.
There has always been a tradition of taking a short break without agenda in Sweden. (non-work related is fine too).
Now that it is remote, its simply done in a video chat and it works equally well.
That's a really good idea.
My version of this is to just suggest a call for very minor things and then try to toss in a good bit of small talk since we're on the call anyway.
1: https://watercooler.site
That said, the garden has been one of the most calming, literally grounding things since this began. We’ve all gotten a lot out of it. Something about taking care of a living thing. The scale could range from a tiny bonsai tree in a container, to a row of vegetables if you have space for it.
Edit: I realize this doesn’t answer the question directly, but it’s been soothing so figured I’d share it anyway.
Now that I am home, I found other things to do. Like staring out of the window, reading reddit/HN, taking a quick nap or cook something to eat.
It's not so bad. I don't miss people, I don't miss co-workers.
If someone had a question or needed some collaboration input they would just unmute themselves and start talking. Usually a few seconds later others would also unmute and join the conversation. If more discussion was needed we would switch from our main channel to a private channel.
This setup worked really well for us and we liked the low friction way of quickly talking to someone without messaging them and setting up a call.
Being a hopeless extrovert, I really get how difficult it is not being in the office.
For me, I have to replace human interaction with co-workers with some other face-to-face source. I have been in the quarantine bubble with my sisters who live on the same street, and sometimes I have to go to my brother-in-law's house and talk to him for a few hours just to get that part of me out. It has also been helpful she's sometimes to work around my distracting children. I can't do it all the time, and more often than not I have to lock myself away in the office in the basement, but as another top commenter has said, those little sounds of other people interacting and living really really help. I plan on taking his advice and opening up a twitch channel while I work.
But what many introverts (including several members of my family) do not understand is that electronic interaction is like eating tofu when you really just want red meat. It's sort of helps but it doesn't really satisfy. I have to get face-to-face interaction. I have done things like plan a weekly fireside for those in my family with the same problem where we can sit around a fire six feet apart from each other.
Well, we need to vent a bit. For the rest of our lives most of us will be forced to live by the rules defined by extraverts. This is our rare opportunity for schadenfreude. One year later, we will spend our days at pointless meetings and teambuilding activities, wishing we could be alone or with our families instead. Or we will sit in the open spaces which pointlessly violate our need for privacy for 8 hours a day, and we will pretend that it's okay because we need to pay our bills.
But of course there also should be a place for a serious debate of people who have the opposite problem.
It’s not healthy.
The thing is, WFH is not for everyone. Some people will thrive in it, and some will not, and that's OK. Don't try and force yourself into a pattern that doesn't suit. Once the pandemic is over, revert to the work environment you enjoy most.
In the meantime, if you feel lonely, try always-on voice comms with your teammates while you all work as usual, mostly the audio will be quiet, but it does allow for people to spontaneously ask questions, or bounce ideas, is if you all were still in the office.
A little more awkward nowadays with lockdowns and such, which has me a little twitchy.
What software or hardware does your team use for this?
Offices aren't healthy for many.
Lost time from commuting, increased carbon footprint, high distraction, and low control over the environment are disadvantages not shared with a properly configured home office.
I get to spend more time exercising, more time with loved ones, and pets, and I save money.
I also do get to talk and banter with coworkers on video calls and slack.
As an introvert with a medical condition, a wife and three kids at home, remote working is the best thing that's ever happened in my career, and I can't see myself working in an office unless there were some incredibly good incentives (and closed individual offices).
I have made amazing, lifelong friends through workplaces, but depending on one's workplace for human interaction is fraught. Workplaces are generally unhealthy places to varying degrees.
This is capitalism. I am not anti-capitalism, but the reality is that capitalism is all about extracting value from labor. Making friends at work is a bit like chunks of fruit befriending each other as they're fed through a juice presser.
This is wonderful to read!What I miss is the feeling of having people around. Hearing voices, movements, something unexpected happening from time to time.
I've found that having twitch in the background makes the feeling disappear. I choose streams that are kinda monotone, low interaction, from likeable streamers.
Personally, I'm generally fine without a lot of social interaction. But at my work we use Teams a ton at work and in my role I have a little too much interaction tbh. But basically we've turned lots of interactions into "hey you have a sec?" followed by a voice or video chat. Some of my coworkers who were really struggling seem to be responding well to this kind of thing.
I’m also on conference calls half the day. Quiet is nice.
Right.
If remote working makes you suffer socially, then it could be your social life that needs looking at, not your work-environment.
At some point I quit, went through some other jobn searches, and started working from home doing software dev work.
SO I've been working on my own for 20 years, and 10 of those have been doing remote dev work.
Two things have been helpful:
- I had a family for most of that time, - I have activities outside of work (playing music and rock climbing) that I need to interact with other folks to do.
For the first six weeks or so of the pandemic quarantine I curtailed those activities.
At this point, I now have a small group of 10 or so people across two bands and a couple of dudes I climb with, and so I am back into having some socialization. If I get exposed (or anyone in my groups is exposed), it's a small enough set of people I can contract trace.
So, with the exception of the 75-person buddist group I was going to and playing music in bars, I am more or less back to the amount of socialization I was getting before the pandemic.
That's what keeps me from feeling isolated.
I work for a small company, and the coworkers in my office were all pretty anti-social to begin with. So I went from not talking to them in the office to not talking to them remotely.
I do have a couple people I enjoy interacting with from work, but they live on the other side of the country, so it's always been me talking to them over the phone. That's kept up pretty much the same.
As to the rest of the isolation, we had to adjust a fair bit for that, but it's ended up we've just gotten to be better friends with our neighbors. I read somewhere that it's cruel to keep kids from seeing any other kids, which is sort of how I felt to begin with, so it gave us a convenient excuse.
Basically we went from always visiting with people 15 miles away from home, to always visiting people 100 feet from home. It hasn't been too bad honestly.
Plus we've started skyping with family members on the weekends, which has been nice.
Seriously though - having an emotionally intimate partner in the home is a fantastic way to get through just about anything that life can throw at you. Married or not, same or different sex, sexual or asexual, it’s a very valuable connection that I don’t regret forming.
So I think people are disengaged and you should push to have informal work conversations, perhaps in chat or email, about things that it’s easy to just mention in person. A lot of my work conversations that start as “I know it’s written down somewhere but which team owns this” end with “well how’s the kids, etc” which is mundane, but like, shits bad, the answer may not be just “oh, fine.”
In some ways, it is even beter this way. We never could riff on our leaders all hands meetings in person the way we can over slack while watching their zoom call.
You can check it out at : https://www.bl1p.app or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L__GJEdepus
Also, meetings seems to be most efficient and comfortable when it's all or nothing = either everyone is virtual, or they're all physical.
If you think this is bad and that you are now suffering terribly, then remember it next time, when you could socialize with a geek and be a nice person. Sometimes even we need some form of social interaction or a friend. Your geek friends might thank you one day.
Given it's summer (in the US) and school's out, those teenage boys may be thinking the same thing about their parents! ;-)
Why not take up botany https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTsAFpSXj7Y
it is incredible.
- Work around ~12 hrs per day
- Read books.
- Play video games.
- Workout.
- No dark thoughts (for those who understand the IT Crowd puns)
- Repeat.
oraclerank.com kaggle.com
sounds like you've already found a like minded coworker who doesn't mind being taking a break from work to hang out with you. Don't wear him/her out :) It is rare to find someone who isn't a slave to sprint goals.