Council Post: The Lonely Side Of Remote Work Might Mean Opportunities For Innovation

“In 2015 we had a significant turning point. Our annual revenue run rate had actually simply crossed $1 million. Success like this has to be celebrated, so I place on “The Winner Takes It All” by ABBA and brought a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. Raising my golden glass of bubbly to all those individuals who worked so difficult for numerous months to bring us here, I was filled with gratitude and pride. This is my group! And this is just the beginning. Then, suddenly whatever stopped. The smiling faces froze. A few of them disappeared into the black. 5 words popped up on my laptop screen: Your internet connection is unstable. And after that I realized I’m sitting alone in my space with a glass of champagne, gazing at the Zoom window.”

A founder of a cybersecurity start-up from the east coast of the U.S. just recently informed me this story. In less than 2 years, they grew from 2 to 35 employees, and like lots of other business in the tech sector, they selected a remote-first workplace design.

Long before the Covid-19 pandemic made working from home commonplace, many start-ups had decided they didn’t need a physical headquarters. Enabled by high-speed web and the tools for asynchronous communication, like Slack or Zoom, this model has actually been championed by such success stories as Zapier, GitLab and 37 Signals– the developers of Basecamp and Ruby on Rails.

A lot has actually been blogged about the benefits of remote work. The business gain from access to the much larger skill pool and significant cost savings on lease and other expenses associated with having a brick-and-mortar office. At the same time, employees conserve hundreds of hours of travelling time, delight in versatile schedules and eat every lunch with their families.

Yet, like a lot of things in our lives, this versatility and efficiency come at a price. As part of my work at YouTeam, I surveyed leaders of over a hundred remote groups in the last 12 months. Among the questions I asked was, “What is the most significant discomfort point in having a remote group?” The response that many often appeared was not time zones or global payroll, as one might anticipate. It was “the lack of human connection in between workers.” 9 out of 10 supervisors I talked to called this concern among the leading pain points for their company.

You see, individuals anticipate much more from their work than just a paycheck. Work takes such a substantial piece of our time that we naturally desire it to supply numerous other things that give life its colors: social connections, new relationships, friendships, individual growth and enjoyable. This all comes naturally, spontaneously– when everyone is in the same space. When your only connection to your associates is through a laptop screen, there is little area for spontaneity. The inconvenient truth about remote work is that a staff member’s role in the company is basically decreased to their expert function. There is no watercooler, no pizza nights, no swinging at each others’ desks, no poking shoulders, no Friday drinks, no luncheons, no ping pong breaks, no off-site. From the management perspective, this manifests in weaker company culture, faster staff member burnout and shakier loyalty. According to one survey, remote workers are typically less engaged and less likely to successfully communicate with their peers.

The most efficient way to build a human connection is clear– just put everyone in the same space. That is why most of the remote-first business run regular parties, normally in exotic places like Bali or Tulum. The main problem with these corporate events is that you only can do one or 2 of them each year. This still leaves the frustrating majority of staff member’s time to be spent alone. One thing parties reveal is that the crucial to developing human connection is through shared experiences. You require things in typical with another individual for this subtle human bond to emerge. Jokes, games, failures, moments of excitement, even anxiety– anything you might keep in mind together later on is what creates this warm communion with other human beings we’re all yearning.

These aspects of remote work present a surprising opportunity to develop innovative technology that resolves these pain points. One such prospective service is virtual truth. At the current Facebook Connect conference, Mark Zuckerberg dedicated a huge part of his keynote presentation to how VR can bring remote colleagues into one space. A number of the functions of the much-hyped Oculus 2 were developed for remote cooperation with Infinite Office, pertaining to the live beta this winter season, being the most notable. Lack of human connection isn’t the only recession of the no-office method. Even though lots of cash-scrappy startups are going remote-first, numerous magnate still share the opinion of Reed Hastings of Netflix, who sees the forced WFH policy as a “pure unfavorable.”

The truth is, there are many issues still waiting to be resolved in order for remote work to end up being commonplace. And you know what? I believe that is actually a truly good idea.

Forbes Person Resources Council is an invitation-only organization for HR executives throughout all industries.