A little while back I wrote about the lessons I’ve learned from remote work, and the experience of working from home full time over the last year has been a net-positive for me. In fact, I love remote work—It’d be hard for me to adjust back to an in-office life again.
But there is one big downside I’ve been forced to reckon with: Isolation.
This is perhaps obvious, yet something I ultimately underestimated. It’s hard to appreciate the value of the social dynamic of an in-person work environment until you no longer have it to fall back on. Even for introverts like myself, isolation and the lack of that face to face experience can make the dynamics and communication styles in a workplace challenging at times.
Video conferencing helps immensely here, but even it is not a perfect substitute.
When an issue arises, or a problem needs to be escalated, it can be challenging to convey meaning and get everyone on the same page when emotions are raw. There’s something about sitting down face to face to resolve a dispute that technology just hasn’t quite solved yet.
The solution here, oddly, is more meetings. It’s easy to try and burn the candle from both ends—striving to be both a distributed team and embracing a meeting-light culture, but at least in the beginning, and especially with new team members, face to face time, whether virtual or in-person is crucial.