I started a new job after the start of COVID, and it has been really hard to build the personal relationships to become fully effective (our offices are spread out globally). My manager has said that pre-COVID days, I would have had the chance to meet many of my colleagues face-to-face and have a few beers with them, which would have greased the wheel to creating some personal connections. It's always easier to request help from someone who has a good impression of you.
Similarly with clients. It's much easier for people to go on attack-mode when they are displeased when it's only through email or a video conference where people have their cameras off. Unhappy clients can be placated and turned towards working together to a solution much more easily in person, and happy clients can be turned into long term partners more easily over dinner and friendly chats. This is especially true of customers in Asia.
As a previous new hire who got into a new job during full blown Covid, I had no problem whatsoever building a good relationship with my colleagues. Regular routines were setup, the team communicated frequently. Frequent calls. Eventually mMemes started to be shared, and we built a good work/personal friendship exclusively online.
I didn't miss face-to-face in the slightest, nor did i feel like i didn't belong, or that I was lacking support. We have plenty of online trainings as well.
Face to face being needed for new hires is another myth that needs to go.
This has long been true to some degree when you work with people scattered around the world. But it's a legit concern that, overall, we're probably developing much shallower relationships with the people we work with compared to when we were together in-person more of the time. Doubtless there are people who prefer just tuning out co-workers as much as possible. But it's reasonable to ask how it will affect many companies in the longer run when many co-worker relationships are very surface compared to pre-COVID.
This was an area that improved hugely at my workplace, because we're spread across multiple buildings in multiple cities anyway; the pre-COVID dynamic was that people were in the habit of including only those in physical proximity. COVID has made cross-city collab instinctive for people.
The comment you're responding to sounds like a team resenting the inability to have the (bad) habit of only talking to people in physical proximity.
Agreed. I didn't mind for the first part of the pandemic, as I knew everyone on my team and we just kept shooting the shit on chat or video. But then I switched jobs, and last week was actually the first time I met most of them. I've found it much harder to build the same rapport.
I absolutely have close work (and friend) relationships with people on far flung teams, and even companies I no longer work for in countries I'll never visit, whom I've never met in meatspace (or only a couple times at conferences or whatever). These relationships were built mainly by IRC/jabber/slack (depending on the vintage) and phone calls/videocon though, not tickets and email. Time zone probably matters more than anything -- I keep in touch with colleagues from India who I met when working third shift in web hosting support, but couldn't tell you the names of the daywalkers from the same office I was in.
Modern corporate environments are spread out all over the planet. If you can't build relationships without sharing air, you will be at a massive disadvantage. That's just how it is, and it isn't something that was caused by the pandemic, it's a consequence of intense globalization over the past ~40 years and an aggressive investor-driven acquisitions culture.
As many of us do realize forming connections at work across groups is a great way to help yourself and your team. I wanted to check how you approach it generally and how if at all, your approach changed with Covid.
Yeah, I'd argue that this hasn't changed during/due to the pandemic.
Gravitating towards people you know happened already even in an in-person setting.
The difference is lack of opportunities outside of core work to engage with others and getting to know them, i.e. there are fewer and less diverse forcing functions. In the past it was getting lunch together a few times, now maybe the only forcing function is your manager assigning you to work or as a mentor, etc. Which is not as effective IMO to build healthy same-level relationships.
This is becoming less true. In my workplace people are increasingly requesting at least some face-to-face interaction, both for business and social reasons. I've even had interview candidates request a desire for some sort of direct social interaction.
If you focus on making friends instead of enemies (or at least people know they can rely on you, and are willing to say so to management), the word will get around, and in this disconnected environment, managers spend more time asking around about how other employees are doing.
Put another way - your reputation is a lot more important now than it used to be. It's a lot harder to schmooze the bosses than it was in person.
Yeah, except one has seen people next to each other in cubicles working on the same project not really talking with each other unless dragged into a meeting room (that also could be virtual later during pandemic) ... and others who drop just few chat messages around to identify their person of interest and just reach out regardless of whether they are near by or in another coorp office in another city? I believe it is a people are different problem, and also this is just belief ;)
First off, I recognise what a privileged position I have in the Covid-world - a nice middle class job that can be done sitting down in front of a PC at home. Compared to pretty much everyone else on the planet I have it just fine.
I just have noticed however, that I, and my coworkers are ... getting on less well. Maybe it's me, or maybe it's that the chats over cups of coffee, the walls in the fresh air chatting about projects or gossip or nothing much actually play a really strong role in maintaining team cohesion and trust.
It's hard to pinpoint a problem but things just are getting missed.
Maybe it was always this way. or maybe we have spent the good capital accrued over those cups of coffee and are now starting to creep into overdraft.
Unfortunately, there is a drop in empathy and trust (to varying degrees) when interacting with those who one hasn't met in person. Being in office, talking to your teammates face-to-face is super valuable when the team members are new to each other. Once the rapport is established, let each person do what works the best for them.
I'm sympathetic to that. Certainly much earlier in my career, I had a lot of day-to-day personal contact with most of the people I worked with. Of course it was a different time with much different communication methods available--basically desk phone and early internal company email--and expectations for in-person meetings and hallway conversations.
But today even if I were in my local office, almost no one I work with would be in that office even if they weren't WFH anyway.
There's also a personal element. It's nice to see the faces of the people you work with throughout the day. Certainly has helped to create a tighter social bond on our team.
Agree! And in senior roles, it is still much easier to make personal connections, grow networks, and build consensus with at least some personal face time.
Or, it could jsut be that middle managers are extroverted and extremely desperate for social engagement, like in meetings because they have no life outside of work. Harsh, I know. but, several friends i have that are managers admitted to me that they felt the covid lock downs were hard on them because they couldn't see or interact with anyone in person.
The tightest professional relationships I've made in many moons were made entirely remote during some Covid-19 relief work. I still haven't met any of them in person, but there was as much humanity in that project as we ever get working-from-work.
Similarly with clients. It's much easier for people to go on attack-mode when they are displeased when it's only through email or a video conference where people have their cameras off. Unhappy clients can be placated and turned towards working together to a solution much more easily in person, and happy clients can be turned into long term partners more easily over dinner and friendly chats. This is especially true of customers in Asia.
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