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this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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Because the #1 reason why employees will stay at a job that underpays them is because they like the people they work with. And you can’t form those bonds remotely.
I agree with the first part, disagree with the second part. You absolutely can form bond remotely, some of my closest friends are online-only. I've even met some of my online-only friends IRL once or twice. I've become close with online-only coworkers too, honestly closer than I was with a lot of people in the office.
Remote work does work. Return to office is just a power grab by companies and real estate sunken cost fallacy.
Yes you can, what on earth are you talking about? I've been remote for 5 years now and I have close relationships with most of the people I work with, especially the devs on my team. Sometimes we'll debug an issue or discuss something and then afterwards bullshit for a while on the phone.
Are people really this inept? You can have remote relationships especially if you make time for it.
Except that you absolutely can if the company has a good remote culture.
The company I was at prior to the pandemic and all throughout the height of the pandemic had such a culture. Even before the pandemic our work chat had rooms for different teams, different products/projects, and general subjects including non-work-related ones. And the chats were active and lively. And during the pandemic it only got more so. There was a very strong bond between coworkers, including new people first onboarded as WFH.
After we got bought out by a new company and they mandated 100% from the office, I left (as did over 50% of the years of experience in the dev teams). My new company is actually still hybrid/remote, with most people working from the office occasionally but anything including 100% remote being allowed at least after initial onboarding.
But I actually think this company is really bad at remote culture. There are a handful of public chat rooms but they almost never get used, and there's nothing off-topic at all. It creates a feeling that reaching out to someone is a bigger hurdle than it was at my last place, and greatly reduces collaboration.
At my last place, working collaboratively was the norm and it translated extremely well to remote work. Here everyone is much more siloed and I don't think it works as well. Especially if your goal is to create interpersonal bonds.
I think that any study you find over the past 30 years will show that while online relationships can be meaningful in some cases, the average person will not form as strong a connection as they would in person.
The term for this is parasocial relationships, and you have truth to your claims
Huh, weird. The Twitch chats I hang out with and I tend to use "parasocial" as a term in which people develop a relationship with others that people haven't really seen or spoken to. I've seen them and myself use the term to talk about how chats have relationships with streamers themselves, which aligns with your definition, but I've also seen it used between Internet users that have minimal interaction with others aside from texting.
I've made friends online via Xbox that I have on other social media and that know my face/voice/background, but I try to secure more of my anonymity these days. I wouldn't consider those relationships as parasocial, but in some ways, depending on how the relationship evolves and grows or decays over time, I'd say they dip in and out of being parasocial and tangible.
Perhaps parasocial might be better thought of as a class of relationships people share that are digital and that don't manifest IRL in any meaningful ways (excluding face/voice/identity).
Maybe the idea I'm getting at here has a term coined for it already. I'd be willing to change my vocabulary if you suggest something!
Because they aren't putting effort into it and neither is the company.
If you can talk to someone you can form a relationship with them. Period. This is not hard to figure out.
Remote culture requires putting effort into it. You have regular online events with the team just for fun and you ask people to stay after the scrum for an open floor once a week or so, etc. You invest in the social aspect of remote work.
Studies can say important things but they can't contradict lived experience and their methodology can also be flawed or biased.
I’m not limiting this to work.
And of course you can have a relationship with someone remotely.
But overall, for the average person, in-person relationships are going to be stronger. Friends, family, romantic relationships, hobbies, work, you name it.
Been remote for years, number two is just flat out bull shit.
But it doesn’t make sense. If I would have people which I like so much in the office would, you know, go to the office. If I don’t wonna go well… then I don’t like those people enough and there can’t be bonds anyway. We will just come, say hi, do job, go home. What a great creativity boost
Definitely disagree on this one. Worked a job across the pandemic that was completely virtual and I never met my coworkers in person. A number of us left about 6 months ago due to layoffs but we all flew out to meet up with each other last week and hang out. That’s almost an entire department of folk that now work in different companies taking the time and personal expense to travel and hang out with each other so I’d say a meaningful bond was built. It absolutely can happen, managers just need to be informed on how to do it. If any org should be prepared for this it’s Zoom. This is just being super lazy on the part of Zoom and having a lack of confidence in their own product.