If you’ve ever begun a new job at your kitchen table, laptop sitting next to your coffee cup, then you know the strange pang of hoping to get to know coworkers you’ve only ever met in pixelated squares. Work has evolved, and with it, the manner in which we form friendships at work.
Spontaneous hallway conversations and spur-of-the-moment coffee errands are a thing of the past. Now, making genuine connections with colleagues frequently requires traversing a labyrinth of video conferences, Slack conversations, and online calendars.
It’s not you making friends at the office really does take more effort when it’s all virtual. Beth Schinoff, a Boston College professor who researches colleague friendship, notes the social aspect of work is significantly impaired by remote arrangements.
The applications we count on Zoom, Slack, email are excellent for getting things accomplished, but they aren’t designed for the type of accidental encounters that create real relationships. Science supports this: a survey by Pew Research Center discovered that most recently remote workers reported feeling less connected to their colleagues, whereas only a lesser proportion of veteran remote workers did so.
The longer you work from home, the more accustomed you get, but that first feeling of loneliness is true. So what’s actually happening deep down? Schinoff and her team explored this question by researching employees at an international technology firm who spent a lot of time working from home.
They discovered that virtuality itself creates a barrier to friendship. The solution to breaking through it? Something they refer to as “relational cadence.” At the office, you intuitively sense when your colleagues are free, how they prefer to be contacted, and when it is appropriate to swing by for a conversation.
Online, everybody’s on different timetables, living in different locations, and relying on technology to make it happen. This makes it a whole lot more difficult to know when and how to contact, which then impacts trust and the slow build towards friendship.
What’s interesting is the way that virtual work turns the script around on the way friendships develop. Face-to-face, you may determine you like someone because of their vibe, their humor, or the way they have their desk set up work style is secondary. On the computer, it’s reversed.
Work is the setting and the purpose of all interaction. You first become familiar with someone’s reliability, responsiveness, and competence before you ever get any sense of who they are as an individual. Friendship, in this world, develops out of work, not in addition to it.
Fostering actual friendships in an online workplace is hard work, but the reward is great. Being happy, engaged, and resilient at work comes from having relationships that matter, even when our common ground is only a screen. It requires effort, imagination, and a little vulnerability, but those moments of contact no matter how fleeting can make a remote work life feel like a true community.