Remote work is a more popular option than ever, considering how businesses have needed to adapt, but that isn’t to say that this option hasn’t experienced some challenges. One major drawback has been the impact that the situation at hand has had on the cumulative mental health of your team. There is some cognitive dissonance associated with working together while separating—largely because the casual conversations that generally come with working together have been lost.
This might not be the best thing for your business. Let’s go over why, and what you can do about it.
What Can Isolation Do to Your Team Members?
When a person is hired by a business and integrates into the team, it may not be the result of that company’s mission statement or philosophy or what have you. Rather, it may simply be the fact that they’ve grown attached to the people they’re working with. The bond between teammates can become very powerful and, as a result, more collaborative.
This is what presents a challenge when a team is spread out. The casual conversations that help to form and maintain this collaborative bond become more challenging to participate in, oftentimes eliminating them entirely.
This has led, in turn, to strained relationships due to the lack of this socialization.
Improving the Remote Socialization Amongst Your Team
With the use of today’s solutions, these issues can be significantly minimized. Rather than restricting the approved use of business collaboration tools to strictly business, it could be better to encourage your team members to use them to keep in touch through idle conversation. Many tools, like the gaming collaboration app Discord, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams, have been co-opted by businesses as means of enabling persistent communicative capabilities.
Whatever it is that you decide to implement, you need to support it with repeated encouragement so that your team knows how important it is for them to pick up on it. Without these efforts, such changes may not take.
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