Most of us if we are honest have embraced working at home. The commute of one minute to your study as opposed to the hour and a half to work, typically involving a car, train and bus or tube, is far less taxing and helps the environment. However even though Teams and Zoom have features to encourage communication – such as online chat and whiteboards – something is still missing. The face-to-face interaction between two or more human beings.
This was emphatically brought home to me by a stay in hospital for an illness from which I have thankfully pretty much recovered. What I have discovered is that an important element of that recovery is social interaction with hospital staff and indeed with other patients. It is easy to forget how mixing with and chatting with other people in the same “physical” environment is a key part of our lives - and one that cannot I suggest be entirely replaced by the online world. I started out being more self-contained, but rapidly realised that participating in activities organised for the ward in or just chatting to fellow patients and exchanging views with them on all sorts of matters from sport to politics is actually therapeutic – it helps me and others progress.
I am not advocating abandoning work at home. Far from it. I think it brings many benefits for us and our families in addition to not wasting time and money commuting. But (and apologies for starting a sentence with “but” - see this link for a treatise on the subject) if we abandon all sort of social interaction in our professional lives we are going to miss out on the many advantages of actually seeing colleagues and clients in person. See this article The Importance of Positive Relationships in the Workplace which provides:
With lots of people spending more time at work than on any other daily activity, it is vital that individuals within any organization feel connected and supported by peers, subordinates, and leaders.
Social interactions play an essential role in wellbeing, which, in turn, has a positive impact on employee engagement.
I propose that this sort of interaction is fostered by spending some time with colleagues in the same physical space in an office. The so called “water cooler conversations” are actually quite important. Work at the end of the day is all, as a close colleague said to me recently, about relationships and stakeholder management.
This Harvard Business Review article What a Year of WFH Has Done to Our Relationships at Work is well worth a read. This discusses the effect of informal interactions at work on “social capital” i.e. benefits people can get because of who they know. It suggests:
The shift to remote work, however, has changed the nature of social capital in organizations — and not necessarily for the better. While employees report more meetings than ever, they also report more isolation and less connection.
And cites data that:
supports our hypothesis: remote work makes teams more siloed, but adding some in-person time back to the workplace will help.
It recognises that social capital needs to be developed in remote and office working in organisations:
The organizations of the future, the ones people will be most excited to work for, will be those that foster supportive social ties for those in the room, and also those who are not.
concluding that:
The spontaneous, informal interactions at risk in hybrid and remote work are not distractions or unproductive. They foster the employee connections that feed productivity and innovation — these interactions are the soil in which ideas grow.
On the same theme this Forbes article 5 Reasons Social Connections Can Enhance Your Employee Wellness Program proposes that:
Strong social connections make people happier and physically healthier which can translate into work performance.
and proposes that:
Part of cultivating a culture of wellness includes fostering social connections and supporting social well-being among employees. Building social connections in the workplace doesn’t have to mean that all employees should be best friends or that everyone gets along all the time. It’s about fostering an environment that supports mutual respect, trust and belonging among peers.
Permitting some working from home is a great opportunity to enhance the work and development of any professional practice. As Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Meta Platforms Inc. says:
“People are more productive working from home than people would have expected. Some people thought that everything was just going to fall apart, and it hasn’t.”
While Richard Branson founder of the Virgin Group comments:
“We like to give people the freedom to work where they want, safe in the knowledge that they have the drive and expertise to perform excellently. Yours truly has never worked out of an office, and never will.”
However, at the same time the Irish businesswoman Margaret Heffernan advises:
For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate.
And by way of an apt conclusion on this topic Maulik Pancholy, the American actor and writer, says:
I remind myself that I'm always more satisfied by human interaction than by a digital connection.
While the American actress, writer, and web series creator, Felicia Day, sagely observes that:
Social media is an amazing tool, but it's really the face-to-face interaction that makes a long-term impact.
This was emphatically brought home to me by a stay in hospital for an illness from which I have thankfully pretty much recovered. What I have discovered is that an important element of that recovery is social interaction with hospital staff and indeed with other patients. It is easy to forget how mixing with and chatting with other people in the same “physical” environment is a key part of our lives - and one that cannot I suggest be entirely replaced by the online world. I started out being more self-contained, but rapidly realised that participating in activities organised for the ward in or just chatting to fellow patients and exchanging views with them on all sorts of matters from sport to politics is actually therapeutic – it helps me and others progress.
I am not advocating abandoning work at home. Far from it. I think it brings many benefits for us and our families in addition to not wasting time and money commuting. But (and apologies for starting a sentence with “but” - see this link for a treatise on the subject) if we abandon all sort of social interaction in our professional lives we are going to miss out on the many advantages of actually seeing colleagues and clients in person. See this article The Importance of Positive Relationships in the Workplace which provides:
With lots of people spending more time at work than on any other daily activity, it is vital that individuals within any organization feel connected and supported by peers, subordinates, and leaders.
Social interactions play an essential role in wellbeing, which, in turn, has a positive impact on employee engagement.
I propose that this sort of interaction is fostered by spending some time with colleagues in the same physical space in an office. The so called “water cooler conversations” are actually quite important. Work at the end of the day is all, as a close colleague said to me recently, about relationships and stakeholder management.
This Harvard Business Review article What a Year of WFH Has Done to Our Relationships at Work is well worth a read. This discusses the effect of informal interactions at work on “social capital” i.e. benefits people can get because of who they know. It suggests:
The shift to remote work, however, has changed the nature of social capital in organizations — and not necessarily for the better. While employees report more meetings than ever, they also report more isolation and less connection.
And cites data that:
supports our hypothesis: remote work makes teams more siloed, but adding some in-person time back to the workplace will help.
It recognises that social capital needs to be developed in remote and office working in organisations:
The organizations of the future, the ones people will be most excited to work for, will be those that foster supportive social ties for those in the room, and also those who are not.
concluding that:
The spontaneous, informal interactions at risk in hybrid and remote work are not distractions or unproductive. They foster the employee connections that feed productivity and innovation — these interactions are the soil in which ideas grow.
On the same theme this Forbes article 5 Reasons Social Connections Can Enhance Your Employee Wellness Program proposes that:
Strong social connections make people happier and physically healthier which can translate into work performance.
and proposes that:
Part of cultivating a culture of wellness includes fostering social connections and supporting social well-being among employees. Building social connections in the workplace doesn’t have to mean that all employees should be best friends or that everyone gets along all the time. It’s about fostering an environment that supports mutual respect, trust and belonging among peers.
Permitting some working from home is a great opportunity to enhance the work and development of any professional practice. As Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Meta Platforms Inc. says:
“People are more productive working from home than people would have expected. Some people thought that everything was just going to fall apart, and it hasn’t.”
While Richard Branson founder of the Virgin Group comments:
“We like to give people the freedom to work where they want, safe in the knowledge that they have the drive and expertise to perform excellently. Yours truly has never worked out of an office, and never will.”
However, at the same time the Irish businesswoman Margaret Heffernan advises:
For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate.
And by way of an apt conclusion on this topic Maulik Pancholy, the American actor and writer, says:
I remind myself that I'm always more satisfied by human interaction than by a digital connection.
While the American actress, writer, and web series creator, Felicia Day, sagely observes that:
Social media is an amazing tool, but it's really the face-to-face interaction that makes a long-term impact.
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