Does Your Socially Distanced Team Feel… Too Distant?

We’ve reached “The Bleak Midwinter”, and with many of us still working from home, you may be feeling increasingly disconnected from your team.  We hear you! 

In a virtual office environment, finding a colleague to connect with is not as easy as bumping into each other in the hallway.  Yet we know that positive professional relationships foster our sense of purpose, well-being, engagement, and innovation.  (Don’t believe us? Check out the Harvard Business Review or National Business Research Institute.) 

So how can your team build meaningful, long-term connections, even at a distance?

For Sharp Insight, our saving grace has been our Buddy System.  We know, we know.  The name could use an upgrade. (Colleague Connections? Pandemic Partners? Coffee talk?) But try to reserve judgment until you hear more about how we got there! 

Since our start in 2013, Sharp Insight has been a virtual firm.  So, if there’s one thing we know well, it’s how to work closely as a team… from separate living rooms.  Sure, we’ve dabbled in shared workspaces at various locations, but they never stuck.  And as our team expanded, both in size and physical distance away from each other, finding one office that worked for all of us became even harder.  Our solution?  We gave up on finding physical space and focused instead on creating the “virtual space” we needed to build a strong, connected team – the Buddy System. 

From the time a new team member starts, they are matched with a buddy, a colleague who informally supports their onboarding and welcomes them onto team.  Buddies usually begin with weekly Zoom calls, but after onboarding ends, more social calls take over and they often transition to connecting on alternating weeks or even monthly, depending on their schedules and needs.  Of course, buddies aren’t forced to continue beyond a few months’ time… though they usually do!  Our staff have loved the sanctioned, casual break in the workweek to chat about weekend plans, families, hobbies, and funny stories.  Every now and then, the call ends up focused on something work related. (It’s amazing how quickly we can shift from favorite podcasts to survey design!) But our team knows the real purpose of the calls is simply to stay connected.

Of course, the Buddy System may not work for your team. If not, we hope you will consider intentionally creating something similar. If you aren’t ready for a “systematized approach”, try just picking up the phone and giving a colleague a call. In our socially distant work worlds, genuine colleague connections can make all the difference.

While we’re sharing about how we stay connected, we thought it might be a good time to introduce you to our (growing) Sharp Insight team!  We hope there will be an opportunity for you to work with our staff members, veteran and new, in 2021.