Coworking spaces allow you to mix up the mundanity of remote working to get out of the house and meet new people. It also gives you a chance to create a healthy barrier between work life and home life. But if you’re the new guy or gal on staff, a remote workplace might seem challenging at first. You can’t rely on the convenience of casual office interactions to help you develop relationships with co-workers. We have advice on making remote work friends when chatting in the kitchen or stopping by someone’s cubicle is out of the question. If your virtual team isn’t too keen on video challenges, perhaps a photo challenge is more their forte.

The composition of fertile ground for friendship is shared activities, common interests, and comparable challenges. It’s not enough to do something together, like working on the same project or for the same client, if you do not share similar views on, and similar struggles in, that work. Furthermore, friendship grows best on egalitarian ground, hence a degree of equality needs to be established alongside commonality. Sometimes we find the seedling of a friendship at work, like when we notice a coworker who seems to share our outlook on life.

Set Collective Goals for Your Virtual Team

Employees will naturally gravitate toward people of shared interests, so a group chat is a great way for remote employees to bond over their personal passions. Whether it be a shared love of family pets, music, celebrities or travel, having these conversations helps https://remotemode.net/ keep virtual teams engaged and connected. People often come together in the real world over food and drink, so why not use that tactic in the virtual realm as well? Below are a few options for virtual team building activities that involve eating and drinking.

When teams work remotely, culture can be harder to define and implement. Frequent communication will help everyone stay on the same page and build better connections and trusted relationships across the team. Create team-building games to help team members get to know each other better, build trust, and improve communication. For example, you can create a Kahoot trivia with questions about each team member’s hobbies or interests, and have everyone play and learn about each other. As well as helping coworkers gel with each other, when leaders use humor as an interpersonal tool, it can lead to happier employees and better communication.

Add new Toggl time entries to a Google Sheets spreadsheet

As infections dropped, people had somehow forgotten how to return to their normal lives. So now is the time to shed your COVID-induced anti-social behavior. Just change a few of your habits and force yourself out the door. Reddit is a great source to find an open mic night in your area, and even if you don’t want to display your talent (or lack thereof), people are genuinely friendly and willing to talk to you.

This exercise requires two or more participants who are willing to reflect a little more deeply than is typical for icebreakers. People take turns sharing a “rose” (something positive or encouraging they recently experienced), a “thorn” (something challenging or discouraging) and a “bud” (something new, surprising or promising). It encourages people to open up about what’s on their minds at work or in their personal lives. Many people like to know the other members
of their team in person, especially when it comes to long-term projects.

Are You A Friendship Perfectionist?

Many remote teams appreciate sharing funny memes of YouTube videos to take a break from work while still keeping in touch with colleagues and having a laugh together. But how do you go about making friends when you’re working remotely? While the task is not very easy, the good news is that is it possible to stay in touch and have fun. With a little bit of creativity, you might even forget that you’re not in the same office as the rest of the team. Here are some simple ways to make work friends and collaborate with your virtual team when working remotely.

A quick follow-up message is the perfect way to transition that random comment from a meeting into a long-term conversation (and maybe friendship). Learning how to make friends in a remote work environment is a good skill to learn. This could be a channel to share tips for keeping those houseplants alive, swap recipes and dinner ideas, or talk about the books people are reading.