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Do you struggle to develop meaningful relationships with remote colleagues, virtual teammates, and physically distant people that you work with? If so, you are not alone. A global study conducted in March and April, 2020, by SAP, Qualtrics, and Mind Share Partners, of more than 2,000 employees in Australia, France, Germany, New Zealand, Singapore, the UK and the United States found that the pandemic has had number of mental health impacts related to social isolation including:

44.4% of those who are now working from home say their mental health has declined.
Newly remote workers were 30% more likely than employees in other settings to say their mental health has declined since going remote.
Newly remote employees who have worked from home for at least 2 weeks were 50% more likely than employees in other settings to say their mental health has declined due to “more chronic sadness” and “more fatigue” since going remote.

When asked why their mental health declined participants cited multiple issues that they attributed to working remotely in a pandemic including anxiety (24.0%), stress (20.1%), fear of job loss (14.2%), having less to do (8.6%), struggling with the challenge of working from home (8.5%). With the pandemic keeping so many of us apart, it is understandable that people are feeling isolated, lonely, and cut off from their sources of social support and meaningful workplace relationships. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way.

Many of us have people in our lives that simply click with us. No matter how far away they are, or how long it has been since we last spoke, they are never far from our minds and conversations always seem to pick up right where they left off. These people feel emotionally and psychologically close to us even when they may be physically located across town or across the globe. Not only are these kinds of relationships deeply valuable from a psychological perspective, but they also show that meaningful relationships over distance are possible. Research has begun to catch up to our personal experience. In 2008 Wilson, O’Leary, Metiu, and Jett explored this phenomenon with their article “Perceived proximity in virtual work: Explaining the paradox of far-but-close.” Their theory that psychological closeness is driven by communication, self-identification, socio-organizational factors, and individual factors related to each employee has since been echoed and refined through further research.

Frequent, meaningful, and interactive communication is the most visible contributor to perceived proximity, a finding echoed by the Center for Generational Kinetics in their study of call center workers. They showed that 60% of Millennial employees want daily contact with their manager, up to and including multiple times a day. With Millennials forming the largest generational cohort in the labor market today, it is noteworthy that satisfying this need for connection has meaningful business outcomes. They showed that a 33% increase in coaching minutes per employee resulted in a 9% production increase and 15% cost reduction for the firm. Frequent communication builds mental salience, the degree to which individuals remain top of mind, and directly contributes to the feeling that relationships are strong.

However, while regular communication is critical, frequency itself is not enough. Communication must be meaningful and complement the nature of one’s role. In the Center for Generational Kinetics study for example, the increase in coaching minutes per employee entailed purposeful time spent working to develop and equip employees to better perform their day-to-day performance on the job rather than idle chat with coworkers or supervisors. In a study published in the current edition of the Academy of Management Journal (October 2020), Schinoff, Ashforth, and Corley demonstrated that the cadence, or rhythm, of work has a powerful impact on remote relationship development as well.

Cadence is defined as both the rhythm of work experienced by individuals and the extent to which that rhythm synchronizes with others in the firm across distance and time zones. Cadence determines how and when employees meet each other and with whom they have an opportunity to develop a relationship. Sending emails to the other side of the globe provides the necessary information for employees to do their work but the time delays and lack of instant feedback from real time person-to-person communication are meaningful barriers to personal relationship development. In addition, email, data-feeds, and even phone calls are often devoid of information related to social norms and context clues that are critical to relationship formation and empathy.

While asynchronous communication is a hallmark of remote work, it should come as no surprise that connections and relationships form more easily with those whose temporal rhythm more closely matches our own. An intentional and well-designed cadence therefore has the power to do more for relationship development in the digital space than chance-meetings at the office water cooler or break room ever could. Cadence is not random. It is an emergent phenomenon that results from leadership decisions about what work should be done, how and when it will be accomplished, and who is responsible for it.

As organizations continue to embrace remote work in response to Covid-19, the digital workplace provides leaders with more tools to intentionally shape the cadence of their organizations, the substance of their communications, and the culture of their firms than ever before. In the physical realm, architects have long understood the behavioral consequences and performance implications of workplace design. In the emerging workplace, leaders must assume the role of digital architect and pay close attention to its design. It is not enough to create a remote workplace that merely excels at producing the products and services that customers rely on today. Leaders must take care to establish the right cadence and implement communication strategies that will foster employee relationships. Strong relationships are the lifeblood of organizations and support critical business outcomes for long term success including employee productivity, innovation, retention, engagement, and customer satisfaction.

Remote work is no longer a temporary coping mechanism to get us through the pandemic. It is here to stay. Your firm’s performance, and the strength of its culture, will be built on the relationships you enable through the cadence you establish and the quality of your communications. Are you ready for the creativity, flexibility, and growing pains it will demand? It won’t be easy but it will be worth it. Knowledgeable guidance and outside perspective can help.

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References:

Meaningful Relationships and Remote Work

Thanksgiving

Hindsight 2020: Remote Work in the Post-Covid Economy