A lot of what people like about going into the office is that, well, they spend time with people.
That's what the co-working concept developed around, naturally. You are in an office, doing all that familiar work stuff, but because you are actually in a space with people, you get some opportunity for good ol' "water cooler conversation" — the emotional connection of being with people. And we need that.
What a lot of people end up experiencing when they go to remote — when they're just doing Zoom calls and ticking through Slack reminders — is that all of their contact with their coworkers distills down to being just about the work. They're just talking about the logistics of what they are doing. They're not chit-chatting about their own lives and interests, and so they lose that emotional (you could even say spiritual if you're a granola-chompin' hippie or somethin') connection.
And that connection is important.
Important.
It's key to a healthy life, to great work, and to the sense of irreplaceability that remote workers often lose. (Unfortunate fact: If you're not part of a thriving ecosystem of interlinked minds and lives, you're just a doer of tasks, and that makes you replaceable.)
People foster and maintain connections with each other as human animals with nervous systems interacting on subtle levels. Often, a vital but overlooked step in going remote is to find a way to keep that human connection in addition to the work connection.
Here's what we do at Clearview, if you're curious.
1. We make space and time for non-work yammer in our "office."
We check out each others' pets doing silly things, coo at each others' babies, share music, celebrate each others' totally not-work-related accomplishments, and offer DM shoulders to 😭😭😭 on when necessary.
When we get together for a call, it generally kicks off with a solid round of totally off-topic "personal stuff." Everybody gets to know where everybody else is at, before the "work" even starts getting discussed. And we love that. "Can we get back to business" is not something you'll ever hear a Clearviewer say. The business always happens, so we make sure the non-business gets its more-than-fair share.
2. We make an event of it.
Get everybody in front of everybody, Clearview holds two summits a year, in the regional centers of our distributed presence: CEE (central/eastern Europe) and southeast Asia. We invite the entire Clearview clan to each, but we've found that our Clearviewers with young families like to stay close(ish) to home, so we've made that easy.
3. We offer co-working allowances for people who vibe the water cooler.
Super-few of our folks actually use this (which says a lot for the culture of sharing we've worked to build), but we offer co-working allowances for people who really dig the feeling of a sacred space where work lives that they don't. This is part of our commitment to honoring the way each individual person, in each individual body with each individual brain, works best.
4. We encourage meet-ups.
We keep a budget for our Clearviewers to get together locally since plenty of them are within driving distance. Dinner, games, beers, whatever — it's all encouraged. (We get lots of fun photos from these.)
The upshot? Working remotely doesn't have to be a life sentence to some sort of prison island. In fact, it can be the best-connected work you've ever done — if you approach it right.