Rameikis writes about some of the social aspects of work that she feels are lacking for telecommuters (my emphasis):

Working from home and conducting all of your business by phone and through email is not an easy thing. For all the fact that telecommuting has been touted as the way of the future since the early 80s, industry has been very slow in developing effective attitudes, strategies and policies for creating a environment where effective working relationships can be both built and maintained over long distances and across time zones (where some team members are going to bed just as others are getting up).

What invariably suffers from the fairly outdated management principles still in practice is the sense of community. There is no water cooler. No photocopier or coffee station. Developing and maintaining personal connections with the people you work ‘beside’ is not nearly as natural when you have never actually met as it is when you can meet face to face on an almost daily basis. The team building and moral boosting plans they come up with invariably require proximity: you must work at head office to participate in any of them, which leaves the remote workers (more than half of the company’s employees) feeling like second class citizens within the corporation.

I can definitely identify with what Rameikis is talking about here. In some ways, there really is no substitute for face-to-face contact. So much of communication is based on visual clues that even if you make it a point to speak on the phone with colleagues (instead of using email and IM exclusively) you will never have the same level of personal connection with your coworkers than if you were sitting next to them in the same room. (I do not have so much experience with video conferencing, but I have been told that the same holds true there as well).

While chatting on IM is nice, I do not think that this problem will be easily solved, even if some “outdated management principles” are changed to fit some of the needs of today’s remote worker. For the time being, it is something that a person has to be aware of if they are going to be working outside of the office for an extended amount of time. And if you need it, it is up to you to find some other type of social outlet that you would have otherwise sought at the water cooler or coffee station.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 31st, 2007 by Yaakov Ellis and is filed under Opinion, Tips & Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Tags: communication, coworkers, IM, management, relationships
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