How to Make Remote Work Better
Humans are social beings, which can make remote collaboration difficult and stressful.
Deepen human connection to improve remote collaboration.
Human connection is deepened when we can express our emotions well and stay curious about others.
Remote work can challenge the ways we connect emotionally and socially with other humans.
Would you rather have dinner with people over Zoom or in person?
Many people, if given a chance and assuming no health risks, would much rather have dinner in person. The energetic and informational exchange they experience in the physical presence of others is much richer and more satisfying than in a remote setting.
This could account for why people have mixed perceptions about remote work. A 2020 Gallup study found that people report higher levels of stress, worry, sadness, and anxiety in remote working environments compared to in-person environments.
In my experience, many organizations are blind to the impact of remote work on relationships and collaboration. There are ways to make remote work more effective, though. It requires deeper human connection and a curiosity about the stories we automatically tell about other people.
Transactional vs. Collaborative Work
Not all work is the same. Remote work may help or hinder productivity and well-being depending on the nature of the work people do. Remote work allows transactional or heads-down work to be more effective, but creates significant, and often unseen, challenges for collaborative work.
Transactional work doesn’t mean simple work. These tasks are just done with minimal input from others. For example, someone writes a report and passes it to a supervisor for signature. Or someone handles customer requests directly over the phone and doesn’t need to pull others into the conversation. People are more productive doing transactional work remotely, away from the stress of commutes, nosy or chatty co-workers, prying bosses, and the like.
Collaborative work, on the other hand, requires conversations. Lots of them. This kind of work tends to be more ambiguous, less easily defined or contained. Effectiveness of this kind of work relies on trust and collective sense-making. Examples include strategic planning, problem solving, decision making, team building, or addressing novel challenges.
Remote work environments make it harder for people to engage well in conversations that require trust. And while video technology, like Zoom, or chat technology, like Slack, can help, the tools themselves aren’t enough to create effective collaboration.
The reason for this challenge is that humans are social animals. We are wired to detect a wide range of non-verbal cues from other people and infer meaning from them.
When we don’t have access to this richer flow of emotional information from our interactions with people, our brains automatically fill in the blanks with stories and assumptions. We use recent emotional experiences with individuals to make sense of what’s happening now. This can make it difficult to build trust and have effective conversations.
Because we tend to remember negative emotional experiences more vividly than positive ones, our stories about others tend to skew negative.
That awkward pause in the conversation? Conclusion: My co-worker is angry with me again.
That intense look on someone’s face? Conclusion: My boss is judging my ideas negatively like she did 2 months ago!
I was on a group call with a CEO and his leadership team recently. When the CEO joined, all I could notice in the small, grainy video picture was that he was slumped forward and crossing his arms. He seemed angry (not unlike he was on a meeting a couple of weeks ago!). When I inquired what was going on with him over chat, he said everything was great, he was just tired, and his house was cold. He was trying to warm his body.
If we were in person, the group would have been exposed to a much richer set of body and voice cues that would have made it easier to more accurately interpret what was going on.
5 ideas to improve collaborative remote work
Improving the effectiveness of remote collaboration requires intentional and sustained effort to create deeper human connection:
1. Be honest about the type of work you do. Is it more transactional or collaborative? If more collaborative, talk with others about how remote work may be helping or hindering your collective efforts. If you’re struggling with the remote situation, chances are others are too. Just talking about the challenges is half the battle.
2. Become more aware of the stories you hold about others. There’s nothing wrong with the assumptions we make about other people. This is just how our mind works. The skill is in learning how to notice these stories as they arise in our minds and to hold them more lightly rather than a final word on what’s going on. In a remote environment, we have even less data to test our assumptions about others. We need even more curiosity.
3. Preempt others' stories about you by practicing intentional openness. As mentioned above, remote environments make it hard for people to see the subtle emotional cues you communicate through your facial and body movements. Take the guesswork out for people. Label your emotions. “Hey team. Just want to let you know I’m feeling down today because the weather sucks. I just don’t want you to read too much into my body language today.”
Also, use more intentional body language and bigger gestures to convey your points and state of mind. If you’re excited, don’t just smile, maybe put your hands in the air! Don’t just rely on the small micro-expressions in your face to do all of the emotional work like you might do in a “normal” in-person environment.
4. Start meetings with shared emotional openness. One team practice you can try is simply asking people (assuming you have the time) the question “How are you feeling today? ”. It’s a simple practice, but if done in an intentional way, can create much deeper human connections in a remote setting. In a practice like this, hear from everyone and let formal leaders in the meeting go first to role-model vulnerability.
5. Schedule time for human connection. In remote environments, people aren’t exposed to the little snippets of human interaction and observation that might otherwise flow to one’s senses in an office. The way someone walks out of a meeting. How two people interact briefly in the hallway. The watercooler chats and informal chats.
These are all things that add to our social understanding of other people. In a remote setting, you need to request this kind of interaction. They won’t happen on their own. So schedule that one-on-one chat to catch up with a colleague. Ask for that mentoring conversation you’ve been putting off. Send that text after the meeting to ask what was going on for someone.
Put simply, the biggest challenge with remote collaborative work is the stories we get stuck in about other people. Because this happens largely automatically in our minds, we tend to underestimate this challenge. Recognizing this and creating more emotional openness in remote settings will go a long way towards making remote work not only tolerable but more enriching as well.