6 Tips to Help You Build and Maintain Relationships With Your Colleagues in a Remote Environment

Photo by: Naassom Azevedo

As human beings, it is very important to socialize and interact with other people. According to a journal article by Vanessa M. Buote et al “The Importance of Friends: Friendship and Adjustment Among 1st-Year University Students'', friendships are key in helping people adjust to new environments. This also applies to the workplace, especially as a new person like an intern.

Making friendships at work has significant benefits to your mental wellbeing and professional success, including:

· Improving your mood-you feel much better after speaking and interacting with a friend who also happens to be your friend.

· It helps in your career progression- Having friendly relationships with coworkers will help you move up the corporate ladder. For example, it is through these friends that you will find out about vacancies within the company that you can apply for, training opportunities and other beneficial resources that can help you at work. As an intern, this is a very important point for you as you would like to have a full-time position at the end of your internship. These relationship that you foster there could help you achieve this goal.

While making friends at the workplace has proved to be important, the new normal of working remotely has proved to making the process a bit challenging. This is because, in remote work, you won’t meet colleagues in person, will have weird schedules due to time zone differences, and will heavily rely on technology to communicate, rather than face-to-face.

Due to the impersonal nature of remote work, you will need to put in extra effort to make and keep friends from your workplace. Here are a few tips that can help you along as you start making friends in your new workplace.

1. Introduce yourself- this is easier done in a virtual setting, because you will most likely have the tools to do so easily. Your organization probably uses an app to communicate such as WhatsApp, Slack or even simple group emails. You can use these methods to introduce yourself to your coworkers.

Photo by: Tyler Lastovich

2. Have e-coffees with coworkers- in order to get to know your coworkers better and to create a rapport with them. In a remote setting, you can schedule little meetings with coworkers from your department or from other areas of your organization and catch up. This is a great alternative to physical lunches/ coffees.

Photo by: Chris Montgomery

3. Volunteer to help- you will create relationships faster if you offer your help to coworkers. If one of your colleagues needs help with a particular thing, such as help understanding a certain tool, your help will go far in creating and maintaining a good working relationship with them.

4. Attend events- in a remote environment, organisations tend to have both work-related and non-work-related events that you can attend. For example, if your organization is hosting a Halloween trivia night some time in October, that would be a great place to meet people you haven’t met before. Just as in an in-person setting, attending work events helps remove you from your comfort zone and places you in the midst of people you need to interact with in your profession. For example, here at Talanta, we have a weekly happy hour on Fridays where colleagues meet and talk and get to know each other.

5. Recognise others’ achievements- recognize and congratulate your colleagues on their achievements at work and outside of work. Send a congratulatory message through the earlier stated apps to show support when your colleague: finally lands that big client, wins a prestigious company award, graduates from a tough course or even has a baby or gets married.

6. Start a club- you may have a hobby or interest that you would like to share with the rest of your colleagues and would like others to join in. This could be an interest in reading, rock climbing, knitting, cooking or even make-up. You could propose to start a ‘club’ for those with this shared interest to meet and share knowledge about it. This will in turn help create even stronger bonds between you and your coworkers.

There are many more ways in which you can reach out to your coworkers and establish a relationship with them. You will need to understand the culture of your organization and be creative about it.