With no personal connections, “it’s just a job, it’s just a list of tasks, there’s no loyalty to the company,” said Chris Collins, an assistant professor at Cornell who runs a research center for HR studies. He compares isolated workers to gig workers, who can do the same tasks for different companies. People can still feel productive, even satisfied, when they work alone. But when work feels like a transaction, it’s really easy to trade one laptop for another. “It is not surprising that the turnover is so high.”
Can technology help?
In essence, workplace culture is defined by shared norms and routines. Something as simple as providing free coffee can create an office routine for employees to meet or socialize. At their best, those small interactions open the door to friendships or collaboration. Even if they don’t, they make people feel like they belong to a larger group.
Remote working challenges these routines and office norms: when people come in, when they leave, what they wear, and who they interact with. The flexibility to work on your own time, and possibly in sweatpants, is one of the great benefits of remote working. But it can also leave employees feeling aloof, unsure when it’s appropriate to ping a co-worker or how to start a conversation about something unrelated. Since remote working doesn’t seem to go away, there are people trying to solve this problem and make money from it.
One such company, Cleary, creates a “digital lobby” where people can ask questions, post announcements, and congratulate each other on workplace victories. It works a bit like a Facebook feed, personalizing updates for each employee. “If you have 50 people, but they’re in 50 different home offices, you actually have bigger communication challenges than in a 300-employee company where everyone is in one location,” said Thomas Kunjappu, the company’s co-founder. It also provides a place for employees to share personal information about themselves, and icebreaker prompts that can be used before meetings.
Another “virtual office” platform called Tandem encourages employees to share updates throughout the day so colleagues can see when they’re available to chat, walk the dog, or head to work. The intention is for employees to voluntarily report their status, but Tandem can also integrate with platforms such as Asana and Google Docs, so that colleagues can automatically see what someone is doing at the moment. Like Slack, Tandem is designed to help people talk to each other more often while they work. But unlike Slack, it’s designed to show when people are actually available, not just when they’re online.
A promotional video for Tandem recites the common complaints of distributed work. “At the office, you can just look and say, ‘Hey, quick question’ and get an answer,” says one woman, sitting on her bed with her laptop. “But when you’re remote, it’s like — oh, that’s right, I’m all alone.” The implication is that a software product can make people feel more together.
Yet another startup, Donut, aims to “create a human connection between people at work”. Donut integrates with Slack to add new ways for remote workers to socialize, including a cheeky water cooler channel where people who don’t know each other can bond through conversation prompts. (Example: “What’s your favorite potato shape?”) While other software tools aim to strengthen the bonds between people who already work together, Donut is designed for those who don’t. There are fewer reasons to approach a colleague in another department, and it’s more inconvenient to do so virtually. In the #donut channel on Slack, the Donut bot randomly matches colleagues and sets them up for a virtual chat.
