I've worked from home in two jobs - my current one, and one a few years ago. In both cases, I found the biggest problem was being out of sight and out of mind. I would miss out on chatter and...
I've worked from home in two jobs - my current one, and one a few years ago. In both cases, I found the biggest problem was being out of sight and out of mind. I would miss out on chatter and casual information exchanges. So, I would come in to the office after being away for two days and find out that a particular matter I was involved with had progressed in my absence, due to an informal catch-up between a couple of my colleagues, but noone had thought to tell me about it because I wasn't around to tell.
In my current job Slack solved a lot of that problem for us before I ever went remote. It quickly became the preferred communication medium since we could search back for topics and associate...
In my current job Slack solved a lot of that problem for us before I ever went remote. It quickly became the preferred communication medium since we could search back for topics and associate files, so little of importance happens outside of it. There's still the downside of not being able to pop into my coworkers' offices and see if they want to go get coffee, but already having the strong "everything goes in Slack" culture on my team before I left made the transition to remote work really easy in that regard. I could see problems if the team didn't fully buy into it, though, and instead checked it periodically like they would email instead of chatting in it non-stop.
I don't currently work in IT, and there are no IT people in the company I work for (the minimal IT work that needs doing is outsourced to "on call" contractors). They're mostly sales people or...
I don't currently work in IT, and there are no IT people in the company I work for (the minimal IT work that needs doing is outsourced to "on call" contractors). They're mostly sales people or creative types. There's not a culture of using online communication tools. They talk to each other in person.
Even in the previous job, where I was working in an IT team, they still talked to each other, because they were all sitting at adjacent desks. Why would you type to someone who's sitting right next to you or whose desk is just 2 metres away? When you walk past someone's desk on the way to the kitchen, you stop and talk to them, rather than waiting until you get back to your desk to type something.
People talk when they're working together in the same workplace. If you're not there, you don't get included in the casual conversations that happen when people bump into each other or sit near each other.
To be honest, even I wouldn't see the point of typing into an online chat tool to have a conversation with someone whose desk is only a couple of metres away. One of the benefits of working in a shared workplace is to build interpersonal connections, and the only way to do that is interact with the other people. And, those interpersonal connections are the main basis for a feeling of being part of a team.
I guess in our physical workspace it goes down a little differently, as everyone's in separate offices. They can't physically see or talk to each other from where they sit. Sure they still talk...
I guess in our physical workspace it goes down a little differently, as everyone's in separate offices. They can't physically see or talk to each other from where they sit. Sure they still talk throughout the day, but a lot of our work centers around sharing files and images, and it's way easier to do that in chat than gather three people out of their offices around one screen constantly.
I've worked from home in two jobs - my current one, and one a few years ago. In both cases, I found the biggest problem was being out of sight and out of mind. I would miss out on chatter and casual information exchanges. So, I would come in to the office after being away for two days and find out that a particular matter I was involved with had progressed in my absence, due to an informal catch-up between a couple of my colleagues, but noone had thought to tell me about it because I wasn't around to tell.
In my current job Slack solved a lot of that problem for us before I ever went remote. It quickly became the preferred communication medium since we could search back for topics and associate files, so little of importance happens outside of it. There's still the downside of not being able to pop into my coworkers' offices and see if they want to go get coffee, but already having the strong "everything goes in Slack" culture on my team before I left made the transition to remote work really easy in that regard. I could see problems if the team didn't fully buy into it, though, and instead checked it periodically like they would email instead of chatting in it non-stop.
I don't currently work in IT, and there are no IT people in the company I work for (the minimal IT work that needs doing is outsourced to "on call" contractors). They're mostly sales people or creative types. There's not a culture of using online communication tools. They talk to each other in person.
Even in the previous job, where I was working in an IT team, they still talked to each other, because they were all sitting at adjacent desks. Why would you type to someone who's sitting right next to you or whose desk is just 2 metres away? When you walk past someone's desk on the way to the kitchen, you stop and talk to them, rather than waiting until you get back to your desk to type something.
People talk when they're working together in the same workplace. If you're not there, you don't get included in the casual conversations that happen when people bump into each other or sit near each other.
To be honest, even I wouldn't see the point of typing into an online chat tool to have a conversation with someone whose desk is only a couple of metres away. One of the benefits of working in a shared workplace is to build interpersonal connections, and the only way to do that is interact with the other people. And, those interpersonal connections are the main basis for a feeling of being part of a team.
I guess in our physical workspace it goes down a little differently, as everyone's in separate offices. They can't physically see or talk to each other from where they sit. Sure they still talk throughout the day, but a lot of our work centers around sharing files and images, and it's way easier to do that in chat than gather three people out of their offices around one screen constantly.
Did we really need a study to figure that out?