Another interesting opportunity to make friends when you work from home is to join an interest group. You can join a book club, take up painting, attend a cooking class with your neighbors, or do other activities that you want. If you already have some experience, you can quickly find like-minded people by establishing close communication and friendship.
Scheduling an informal chat is great, but this chat needs to be repeated for a friendship to develop. The best way to do this is to put a standing meeting on your calendar, perhaps once a week or once a month, depending on preference. If you live in the same area as a co-worker, you can hang out with them — safely and socially distanced, if need be — even if you both work at home. That may seem obvious, but as a person who knows that I have several colleagues in my area that I’ve never met, I know that it’s not.
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But not only can you do it, you need to do it for both the sake of your sanity and the sake of your career. Okay, but what if you’re rejected by your co-worker and now you have to spend all day on Slack with them wondering why they don’t like you? Truly, jumping back into a social life after so many months of lockdown can be jarring, and everyone’s taking it at their own pace. Making new friends is not as straightforward or easy as it looks in 90s movies. Being an adult in today’s world comes with its own set of complications.
Despite communication on social networks, video conferences with remote colleagues, the impression of loneliness remains. If you are constantly at home, improve your work efficiency but lose your humanity and essential social skills by disconnecting from reality. Working from home has its advantages, but a sense of community is not one of them. Still, feeling connected at work is necessary for our fulfillment in our jobs and lives. Research finds, for example, that people with friends at work are more satisfied with and perform better at their jobs. Lonely employees, in contrast, are less productive and more likely to leave their jobs.
Tips on How to Make Friends When You Work from Home
- At the very least, you have something in common as an icebreaker.
- They can provide comfort and support in stressful situations and they can also help uplevel our careers.
- She currently works as a policy fellow at Millenium Challenge Corporation.
Not only do Millennials and Gen Z (Zennials) have to find and make friends, but they also have to deal with the added pressure of social media and maintaining an online persona. We become friends with the people we see all the time – our next-door neighbor, the college classmate who sat next to us in the lecture hall, or the colleague who shared our cubicle wall. Although children are a handful and can take up a ton of your time, they’re a great way how to make friends when you work from home for you to meet other parents. Whether you’re going to a scheduled mass play date or attending your kid’s sporting events, you can chat with other parents. At the very least, you have something in common as an icebreaker.
Connect
Not only did that feel like an ego-boost, it also helped make meeting virtually a lot more pleasant because I was engaged. Spending that extra few minutes lingering in the Zoom room paid off so well that I plan to be the last person to leave every meeting I can. If you’re all remote, just extend your ice cream-eating and TV-watching into a group chat form, and see if you all click. Once you’ve made two or three emerging work friendships, it’s time to move on to step four.
You may not have a budget for small gifts, and that’s okay. At Atlassian, we also encourage team members to create their own Learning Circles. These are groups of employees that gather monthly to discuss a work topic they’d like to better understand. Because it turns out that connecting with other people at work is not only good for your mental health, it’s good for your job performance. As infections dropped, people had somehow forgotten how to return to their normal lives. So now is the time to shed your COVID-induced anti-social behavior.
Dee Ann Pizzica, engineering manager at Atlassian customer BRD has worked mostly remotely since 2009. She always starts her weekly staff meetings with a different icebreaker question. Even the introverts among us have a need for some type of human connection at work. Long-standing research has shown that 72 percent of people who report having a “work bestie” are satisfied with their jobs, compared to 54 percent of those who don’t have a best friend at work. Even if you don’t make lifelong friends, you’re at least giving yourself the chance to be active and happy through work-life balance. Just because you’re in the market for new friends doesn’t mean your colleagues are, Duffy says.
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