The ‘ghost colleagues’ of the remote workplace – By Joanna York (BBC News) / March 17, 2022
Remote working during the pandemic shrank employees’ worlds. Now, some colleagues feel like they simply don’t exist in workers’ daily lives – and it’s having an effect.
The rituals of office work used to mean communication with colleagues was a given. Chats in the coffee room, communal birthday cakes or a shared walk to the car park at the end of the day provided brief moments to connect outside daily tasks. Even if people didn’t directly work together or weren’t on the same team, employees had at least some colleagues to exchange a few casual words with throughout the workday.
The switch to remote work has changed that. Now, employees work via virtual channels, in a much more siloed manner: they interact with the people they share tasks with. For many, there is no work-related reason to seek out colleagues who aren’t connected to their roles and workloads, and many people’s work worlds have shrunk – no more ‘just because’ chats to the woman in IT or guy in accounts. Colleagues who used to be small – but important – parts of workers’ office lives are now effectively ghosts.
It’s clear this impacts workers; research shows many remote employees feel less connected to their teams and companies. Solving the problem is difficult – after all, Slacking or Zooming a co-worker you don’t know well, for no work-related reason, could feel decidedly odd. Yet finding ways to restore these post-pandemic work communities may be key to ongoing wellbeing at work
CONTINUE > https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220315-the-ghost-colleagues-of-the-remote-workplace
