How to Make Work Friends When You Work Remotely The Science Of Thriving Workplaces

That person you spent eight hours a day with, five days a week is now gone—and suddenly, you’re having lunch alone again and there’s no one to gossip over Slack with. “It’s important that you honor those feelings without judging them or trying to qualify how valid they are,” says Dr. Kirmayer. We spend one third of our life at work, and having work friends helps us feel more connected to the team and makes us feel like we belong. It increases engagement, productivity, job success, and business outcomes like profitability, safety, inventory control and retention, as reported in this 2022 Gallup study. Connecting when not every worker is in the office can be a challenge.

Leaning on them for help is a great way to plant the seeds of a potential friendship. Fast forward to four years later, she has become one of my closest friends. Her life has markedly improved due to her dedication to therapy, and despite our hectic schedules, we make a point to catch up as frequently as possible. Now, I’m not talking about an elevator pitch or a static way to answer the question, “So, what do you do? But what I am talking about is just a simple line that you can use to introduce yourself to anyone at any time.

Ways to Make Friends Remotely

It’s not embarrassing, desperate or clingy to ask someone if they want to get a drink or coffee, even if it’s over a video call. Choose a milestone, like a big project or deadline, or perhaps the start of a new venture as your launching point for a prospective hangout. If you’re close enough to meet in real life, you can also plan something like picking up your favorite ice cream flavors and watching a reality show while texting about it. The options are entirely dependent upon the friendship you’re choosing to forge, and there’s no one way to go about making a new friend. In 2021, I struck up a conversation with someone at a coffee shop, initially with the motive of recruiting them for a job they weren’t interested in. Despite the unsuccessful pitch, we struck up a friendship.

Ways to Make Work Friends When Working Remotely

A chat messaging service is your go-to medium for remote work friendships. Imagine the type of person you’d like to be friends with. If you want to make friends, don’t assume that your future friends will have the same background, gender, or age as you. You might be surprised to see what happens when you expand your horizons.

1. We rely on our workplaces to meet people outside of our family circles.
2. Whether you’re going to a scheduled mass play date or attending your kid’s sporting events, you can chat with other parents.
3. And then one of you invites the other to their karaoke birthday party (true story), and well… the rest is history.
4. If you’re close enough to meet in real life, you can also plan something like picking up your favorite ice cream flavors and watching a reality show while texting about it.

How to make friends when you work from home

1. “Repotting,” according to Ryan Hubbard, founder of the Kitestring Project, means varying the settings in which you interact.
2. Check the schedule and see who else is working that day, and if your coworker thinks you’d all click, ask if they’d like to come along.
3. This LinkedIn Learning course will teach you quite a bit about evaluating risks.
4. Yet, the lack of social interaction can lead to feelings of isolation and loneliness.
5. Each time you’ll become more familiar with the workers and other remote workers.
6. I know a lot of people don’t like being friends with their coworkers.
7. Let’s say you heard a coworker Megan mention in the all-staff meeting that she was late because she was putting her kindergarten son on the school bus for the first time.

She says she’ll sometimes get her spouse’s opinion at home before she hits “send” on a message or email. Many of my closest friends have come from two how to make friends when you work from home schools that I worked at for over forty years. We’ve traveled together, and spent many a day with their grandkids, children, and spouses. You will need to take at least one risk at some point in your career. However, many risks are worth the gamble — especially if you put an emphasis on intelligent risks.

One of the best ways to know what to offer others from friendship is to define what you think is a good friend. Once you have that definition, you can evaluate whether you’re serving that purpose for people in your life. Whenever a person joins a team, they’re asked to introduce themselves and tell the group one thing that’s not on their LinkedIn profile. As I often do, I reached out to the LinkedIn community to find out about how they build and foster work friendships — especially in a hybrid world. While I can’t feature all of their comments, you can find them by clicking here. In other words, it’s completely within your right to decide that you don’t want to invest in friendships at work.

These are many of the same tenets that are essential for in-person friendships, too. Connection doesn’t just happen over coffee or lunch, Kantor says. Arrive at in-person meetings a few minutes early to chat or integrate icebreakers where people share their personal news at the beginning of team meetings. Howe’s team has found a way to make connection a little easier from afar. “We also keep a running weekly virtual fun meeting where we get on camera and spend time talking about anything other than work,” she says. For example, she suggests setting up 30-minute coffee chats with different colleagues each week.

Social media groups are also convenient for sharing insights and making new friends. So, are you wondering how to stay social when working from home? As a customer service recruiting service company, we provide you with some effective strategies for making friends while rocking a remote work lifestyle.

A welcoming group of colleagues from around the world — whose ages ranged from just out of college up to almost ready for retirement — had contributed to the easy transition. We often think likable people are funny or smart or charismatic, but the secret to being likable is actually to like people. According to the theory of inferred attraction, people like people who they think like them. Co-workers will be more likely to want to be your friend if you show them you like them by doing things like greeting them warmly, speaking highly of them, and celebrating their success.

But friendships that are the most likely to survive these types of changes are the ones where you then bring new things into the equation.” And aren’t stuck in the past. Alternatively, your job might have a designated social media platform where you can communicate with your co-workers. Strike up a conversation with someone via the group Slack or other communication channels. Online groups and communities can be really helpful in forging work friendships when working from home. You can connect with people with similar interests and in similar industries, people you may otherwise not have met.