The rituals of office work used to mean communication with colleagues was a given. Chats in the coffee room, communal birthday cakes or a shared walk to the car park at the end of the day provided brief moments to connect outside daily tasks. Even if people didn’t directly work together or weren’t on the same team, employees had at least some colleagues to exchange a few casual words with throughout the workday.
The switch to remote work has changed that. Now, employees work via virtual channels, in a much more siloed manner: they interact with the people they share tasks with. For many, there is no work-related reason to seek out colleagues who aren’t connected to their roles and workloads, and many people’s work worlds have shrunk – no more ‘just because’ chats to the woman in IT or guy in accounts. Colleagues who used to be small – but important – parts of workers’ office lives are now effectively ghosts.
It’s clear this impacts workers; research shows many remote employees feel less connected to their teams and companies. Solving the problem is difficult – after all, Slacking or Zooming a co-worker you don’t know well, for no work-related reason, could feel decidedly odd. Yet finding ways to restore these post-pandemic work communities may be key to ongoing wellbeing at work.
A shrinking world
More than two years since the start of the health crisis, fewer than 30% of knowledge workers around the world are working from the office every day. That means that many employees are interacting with far fewer co-workers than at their desks.
A 2021 Microsoft study of its own staff showed switching to remote work meant “employees didn’t just change who they worked with, but also how they worked with them”. At the company, business groups (such as work teams) and informal communities (such as friendship groups) became less connected; people in different groups connected with each other 25% less than before the pandemic. Groups also became static, as workers hung on to existing connections instead of making new ones.
Casual chats with officemates outside a team were a staple of in-person work life – but now they're gone (Credit: Getty Images)
A second study by a team of US academics and Microsoft researchers analysed email data sent from 1.4 billion professional email accounts across thousands of organisations, including Microsoft, between July 2018 and November 2020, and identified similar results. Organisational silos became more defined during the pandemic, and these silos also became less connected to each other as people talked mainly to their own team members. This trend persisted even as the silos themselves became unstable, for example when members left the company.
Amanda Thomson, founder of Noughty alcohol-free wines, has certainly experienced a loss of connection with some colleagues. Before the pandemic, she interacted constantly with colleagues and contacts, either in the company office in London or at industry events. “There was a huge amount of communication, and I was with people all the time,” she says. As an extrovert, spending time with others gave her a buzz; she would often finish the workday inspired by her interactions.
When the pandemic forced an abrupt switch to full-time remote work, connections with colleagues were very different. The shift came as the company prepared for a global launch, meaning the workload was intense. Instead of being a joy, long virtual meetings with external contacts left Thomson drained. Interactions with colleagues were reduced to daily 15-minute check-ins, as opposed to the casual chats she used to have on and off all day.
“It was pretty productive, but there wasn't any downtime at all,” she says. The opportunity to chat, to joke or to have spontaneous conversations had been squeezed out. Contact with some of her indirect colleagues and work contacts – such as freelancers and fellow founders – stopped altogether, shrinking her social circle at work. “For those of us who are more extrovert, a lot was lost,” she says.
‘No room for nuance’
Research suggests many people feel the same way as Thomson. A 2021 survey by job-search site Indeed found that 73% of people missed socialising in person and 46% missed work-related side conversations that happen in the office. “There are people who utilise work for social aspects, and they like having those social interactions at work through their day,” says Simmy Grover, academic in organisational psychology at University College London.
Part of the reason is that these social ties people have in the workplace feed into their sense of attachment and belonging at work. One US study showed 65% of workers who had switched to teleworking all or most of the time felt less connected to their colleagues than they did before. A second study showed almost a quarter of workers felt disconnected from goings on in their company overall.
"For those of us who are more extrovert, a lot was lost" – Amanda Thomson (Credit: Courtesy of Amanda Thomson)
It makes sense workers would miss daily interactions with colleagues who have become good friends, but there are also reasons employees miss those who play a more casual role in the workday. The outer circle of acquaintances – the friendly colleagues at the coffee machine or the lift – are known as‘weak-tie’ friendships. Research shows interactions with these people – typified by light, casual conversations – bring about feelings of belonging and increased happiness that make the workday more positive.
Much has been written about the impact of reduced interaction between colleagues on workplace innovation, creativity and collaboration. Yet Thomson says the one thing she’s missed above all during her time away from colleagues and contacts is laughter. “Online jokes don't always translate. The other person may or may not get it, and there's no room for nuance so a lot of real-world laughter was missed. I'd hazard a guess that in 2022, we all laugh a lot less than we used to together.”
Birthdays and virtual coffees
For some people, of course, the loss of these interactions may be less significant. Introverts may not miss their ‘ghost colleagues’ as much, while those with caring responsibilities may find the benefits and convenience of remote work outweigh any negatives linked to fewer interactions with people in the office.
The onus is also on companies to find better ways to translate in-person culture into the online space so that colleagues can continue to connect in meaningful ways. Good remote company communications may mean things like creating a newsletter, podcast or virtual town halls to share information workers may have otherwise absorbed in the office. “It takes a deliberate practice, and usually it takes a person or a group of people who are leading the charge and really paying attention,” says Lisette Sutherland, author of Work Together Anywhere.
The colleagues we once saw around the office now feel like they don't even work with us (Credit: Getty Images)
She points out connection happens when we pay attention to each other, “so we need to find ways of doing that, whether that's remembering birthdays or just scheduled virtual coffees”. Other examples can include integrating opportunities for socialising into the workday, for example including a quiz in a meeting or creating a Slack channel for non-work-related chat.
Even so, these online connections can still lack some of the unexpected joy of bumping into a friend at the photocopier or sharing a quick joke with a colleague before a meeting begins; the kind of spontaneous moments that used to regularly improve the workday, but that Grover says are so hard to recreate online.
In Thomson’s case, though she misses pre-pandemic ways of working, she is not planning a full return to in-person work for her company. The benefits of remote work are too significant, both for colleagues who are less social than her and for productivity.
However, as Covid-19 restrictions have been reduced, she has been keen to re-connect with her wider work circle in person where possible. “I’m going out of my way to ensure that whenever there’s a chance to have a fun face-to-face meeting with someone I really like, I’ll make the time,” she says. This includes her own ghost colleagues; she credits real-life meetings with helping to build back strong and weak ties at work.
For people like Thomson, using in-office days to re-establish relationships that were muted or lost during two years of home working may play a crucial part in making their day-to-day job enjoyable. “It's just great to be with people,” says Thomson.
"colleague" - Google News
March 15, 2022 at 02:00PM
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The 'ghost colleagues' of the remote workplace - BBC.com
"colleague" - Google News
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