How to Stay Connected with Colleagues While Working Remotely

By Anca Metiu, Professor of Management at ESSEC Business School

The future has arrived faster than predicted. Over the last year, workers around the world packed up their desks and started working remotely with colleagues they were used to seeing in person. Even taking into account those who already worked remotely part-time, the speed of adjusting to working 100 percent remotely has been remarkable. Despite the physical distance, we have taken advantage of the abundance of technology at our fingertips to feel close to colleagues, managers, and friends.

Formal meetings became a row of faces on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Google Hangouts. Informal encounters, long considered key to innovation, disappeared. Yet work is getting done, projects are advancing, and new ideas are springing up.

Working remotely

Source: Judit Peter/Pexels

How is this possible? How is it possible to feel so close with people who are so far away?

When faced with a dangerous situation, people prove to be remarkably resilient, flexible, and resourceful. The pandemic likely accelerated trends already deep at work in organizations and societies. Also, the omnipresence of technology, combined with the urgency to protect human lives, very likely led to a leap in adopting new work practices. Both explanations are reasonable. They are also compatible with the results of a study in which my colleagues and I examined the factors that make people feel close to faraway colleagues.

My research identifies specific factors that help explain the speed and smoothness of the adaptations to remote work. Together with my co-authors, Michael Boyer O’Leary (Georgetown University) and Jeanne Wilson (The College of William & Mary), we used the term perceived proximity to describe the feelings of closeness between coworkers.

In the BC (before COVID-19) world, our study showed that the physical distances between colleagues (objective proximity) actually had generally weaker or mixed relationships with feelings of closeness (perceived proximity)—and no effect on relationship quality. In other words, on average, people felt as close to their remote collaborators as they did to collocated ones.

A few years ago, those findings were surprising. Nowadays, they seem premonitory.

We also found that people develop feelings of closeness with distant others when they communicate via technology to uncover deep similarities and develop a pool of shared experiences. While it may seem impersonal, technology can be used to build community and connections: consider the popularity of dating apps and social media networks. It makes sense that technology can also be used in a workplace setting to stay connected (in both senses of the word) to our colleagues, despite being physically distant.

These findings help explain the speed and effectiveness of the adaptation. In the first weeks of the lockdown, co-workers relied on an existing pool of shared experiences. Further, we shared in the strangeness and stress of adjusting to the new normal.

As the crisis continues, and as organizations and employees decide they want to continue, at least partially, to work remotely, that pool may decrease—due to turnover, expansion in new markets, etc. Therefore, managers and leaders should likely refrain from declaring the transition a success and simply carrying on with their current practices indefinitely. With time, the loss of context will increase, with consequences for collaboration and morale. Therefore, we all need to make an effort to prevent this huge loss of context from harming collaboration.

What does that look like in practice? Here are four research-based managerial recommendations, adapted to the current context.

1. Ensure that dispersed teams have time to bond.

It is important to carve out time to identify, learn, and discuss areas of common ground because this creates a basis for trust and strong relationships. Teams must fight the tendency to be hyper-task-focused; people need the opportunity to identify deep similarities (attitudes toward work, reliability, values) as opposed to surface similarities (demographic characteristics).

Technology enables the creation of vivid images of the faraway others, reduces uncertainty about the others’ work, and helps us envision others’ situations. One practice that managers could implement is regular virtual “coffee breaks,” where team members have the chance to chat about both work and non-work subjects as they would in person.

2. Overcommunicate in predictable, regular ways.

This may seem painfully trite, but I see the volume and predictability of communications as a major lesson (from our work and others) to combat fuzziness surrounding role clarity, a heightened tendency to make faulty attributions, and to keep conflicts from escalating.

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There's nothing worse in remote work than sharing an idea with team members and not hearing back from them. Did they not like my idea? Are they swamped with work? Are they on holiday? Or is something really wrong? ... You get the idea. The wheels spin too quickly when teammates are out of contact. This can be especially complicated given the particular conditions of the crisis, such as partial unemployment and homeschooling, which mean that people may be on different schedules. Under these conditions, it is easy for messages to fall through the cracks, especially when you don’t see colleagues in the hallway to jog your memory.

How can we avoid playing a game of Broken Telephone? One way is by establishing regular calls as a larger group and in smaller breakout groups, where members share what they have been working on and people have the opportunity to discuss. Regular meetings will also ensure that team members have a sense of each other’s workloads, holiday time, etc., to reduce the possibility that wires get crossed along the way.

To (attempt to) coin a phrase, it's not so much absence or distance that matters as it is silence. This is the job of project managers: to lay the infrastructure for communication.

3. Trust your employees and colleagues.

Another managerial takeaway is that employees can be trusted—both in crises and in normal times. Most of the adaptations to the COVID-19 crisis were done individually, with the guidance of managers and the technical assistance of IT. We can agree that the switch to online work was largely due to individual efforts, initiatives, and ideas. People value autonomy that makes them feel valuable (and when their efforts are recognized and praised, valued). They want to maintain this autonomy, until now touted as the prerogative of an elite, the white-collar workers.

Managers will have to recognize employees’ efforts, congratulate them, and open frank discussions about how employees see the future of work and the practices and lessons from the crisis period worth maintaining in a—hopefully—calmer future. An oft-repeated concern about remote work is its impact on productivity, with some worried that employees may get distracted and work less effectively when at home. Past research has indicated that this is not the case and that productivity can actually improve when working remotely (c.f. Bloom et al., 2014), highlighting the importance of trusting your employees and colleagues to get the job done.

A related recommendation is to extend this invitation for frank discussions about the desired way to accomplish one’s work to employees who did not switch to remote work because of the sectors in which they operate. Cashiers, nurses, doctors, drivers, cleaners, and other essential workers have all adapted to working in dangerous conditions. They did so without so much as a murmur. With increased danger comes increased responsibility and dignity. Let’s acknowledge that this dignity includes the right to have a say in the way their work is organized and executed.

4. Listen to employees’ larger concerns.

Another recommendation is to listen to employees who may have to deal with increased strain due to personal issues. The COVID-19 crisis highlights that the home front can be a huge source of stress for employees, due to cramped lodgings, home-schooling, and even domestic violence. While it is not managers’ responsibility to resolve such issues, being attentive to the particular needs of employees, adjusting schedules to alleviate stress when possible, and lending a friendly ear can go a long way.

One way to do this is by encouraging people to join virtual meetings early and leaving time for socializing at the end. This gives people the opportunity to have informal discussions. Another, more proactive way is to offer a listening ear for those in need.

In times of crisis, people tend to learn a lot about themselves and about the world. The lessons from the current crisis will unfold over time, but we know one thing already. While we may not be in the office with our colleagues every day, sharing offices and chatting by the coffee machine, we can still nurture our relationships and work together productively. In other words, we can be far away, and yet feel close.

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