Remote work may be a boon for belonging
One upside of Covid19 forcing thousands (if not millions) of folks to work from home is that people are now seeing their coworkers for what they are: full humans with real lives.
The culture of work too often forces a person to squash and hide their full identities. This leads to only presenting oneself as Professional Worker Bot, instead of as Sandy, who is a kickass account manager — and also a wife and mother with a caring partner, funny-ass kids, an adorable cat that looks like Crookshanks from Harry Potter, and who loves to hang large photographs in her house of mountains she’s climbed.
(All tweets from @arb’s viral thread at https://twitter.com/arb/status/1237098740382445568?s=20)
There’s only so much professional performance we can do when we’re at home surrounded by our Real Lives. And this is a good thing.
The world of work is too often an experience in erasure — of our homes, our hearts, our family and friends, and the shit that matters to us in our lives beyond performance reviews, OKRs and promotions.
My hope is that when Covid19 is contained and remote work is no longer necessary that people hold onto what we’re learning right now.
Companies have been claiming they want their employees to bring their “whole selves” to work—and then failing to produce the conditions for that to occur. Covid19-related remote work means that we have no choice BUT to bring our whole selves to work, because we are at home where our whole selves and whole lives reside.
Research shows that employees experience higher feelings of belonging when their teammates know and accept them for who they really are. Office life rarely provides the conditions for authentic moments of self-disclosure and connection to spontaneously occur. You have to do intentional work to make it happen.
Sometimes the office environment isn’t even supportive of employees’ attempts to proactively increase belonging amongst their teammates. I once had a manager suggest that I cancel the biweekly team-bonding lunch that I facilitated where we shared stories from our lives outside of work and got to know each other as people beyond our jobs. She implied that the lunch “wasn’t a good use of people’s time.” Our team had no other regularly occurring team-bonding activity, so this blew my mind. Authentic connection like this doesn’t “just happen” in office settings—you have to purposefully create the conditions for it, and then treat it as if it’s just as important as all the other meetings.
Belonging is a key factor in employee happiness, engagement, and retention. The upswing in remote work will likely lead to an increase in belonging — and hopefully this balances out the decrease in connection that working solo can lead to. We should lean into this. Don’t hide it. Let your coworkers see you in your natural habitat.
Although there may be moment of slight embarrassment when your spouse walks through the room in their pajamas, or the baby barfs on you during a zoom call, the upside is worth it. Your teammates get to know the real you in a way that no escape room offsite ever could provide.
You’ll get to be known, seen, understood and accepted for more of who you are. Which is something that millions of us have been craving at work all along.
