Enhance your social circle and combat home-office loneliness with these tips! Even if you don’t make lifelong friends, you’re at least giving yourself the chance to be how to make friends when you work from home active and happy through work-life balance. Maybe the most important takeaway for how to make friends working from home is that it has to coincide with your own interests and work life. That is to say, the best way to socialize might just be by involving others in your work-life balance. You should firmly believe that you’re the biggest advocate of your own happiness and urge to make friends.
Just because you’re in the market for new friends doesn’t mean your colleagues are, Duffy says. If your company hosts a retreat or if you find yourself visiting headquarters, use it as an opportunity to socialize with your colleagues. Get a group together for a meal or ask colleagues to join you for coffee or a cocktail.
Ways to Make Work Friends When Working Remotely
From webinars to online workshops, these events are gold mines for meeting new people. Don’t hesitate to interact and exchange contacts with participants. 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. Cummings has some great ideas about how to integrate phone calls into your professional life, even if you’re not used to it. “If a meeting ended five minutes early and you would have debriefed with a colleague, reach out and see if you can hop on a quick call,” she says.
- You don’t need to share deep secrets, but you should try to make interactions about more than just work.
- Most towns and cities have some sort of interest groups that might pique your interest.
- If what you’re doing hasn’t yielded a new friend, acquaintance, cohort, partner in crime, or crony, you need to try something new.
A friendship is a perfect foundation for a relationship, and who doesn’t want a When Harry Met Sally kind of romance? There are plenty of online communities, apps, and websites that can aid you in your search to find a friend. Yes, Facebook might be stale but you can still get value from the platform.
Hop onto social media groups or forums related to your industry or interests. Engaging in discussions is a great way to meet like-minded individuals. So, even if you’re an introvert or you have social anxiety, putting yourself out there might be worth the effort. Your willingness to be friendly will benefit everyone, and it doesn’t have to be rocket science As Cook says, just, “show your humanness and allow others to be real with you as well.” Or, Cummings recommends, you can try something that introduces some of the accidental nature of water cooler conversations back into your virtual world.
Find the Best Remote Position With Afni
- Schedule the occasional coffee break together over video, and as you begin to get to know each other, you will start to open up more.
- At the very least, you have something in common as an icebreaker.
- While our commutes have become shorter, our scope for friendships has gone global.
- However, if meeting people in person is not manageable, you can still combat loneliness by establishing virtual connections.
But just because we’re not physically in the same room doesn’t mean we can’t make friends with our colleagues! They both involve putting yourself out there, getting to know someone new, and making a connection. Being single and working from home means meeting romantic partners might require more than usual time and effort.
Engage in small talk
If you think something is hard, you’ll find excuses not to do it. But if you see it as easy and fun, you’re more likely to follow through. Consider making a friend virtually the same as you would making a friend in person. Find a way to connect with them outside of the work setting and take it step-by-step from there. You could follow and message them on a social media platform or get their personal email to make a connection. One way to minimize the uncertainty of approaching a coworker is to be upfront about how much time you’re asking for and what you’re interested in talking about.
When you work remotely, there are often opportunities to travel to the main office or possibly travel to clients with other coworkers. If you do get to see your coworkers in person, it is important you make the most of your time with them. A remote happy hour is basically a video call meeting with no actual work agenda! I’ve done a few of them one-on-one and I’ve also participated in some group ones. You schedule them for the end of the work day and everyone can bring a beverage of choice while chatting in the video meeting. People in an office often schedule happy hours right after work so why can’t you do the same if you are remote?
Remote Work Tips
Friends of friends are a great way to meet people because if you already have a mutual friend with a person, you probably have more in common than you think. Children and teenagers find themselves in environments with people their age and with similar interests. Halpern suggests another way to make friends as a remote worker is to be more intentional during video meetings.
It doesn’t have to be just simple messages and email exchanges. You can go beyond such communication and hold virtual meetings with your coworkers or clients. Another strategy to expand your social circle is to leverage virtual platforms.
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. I tried lingering at a few of my meetings last week, and I am here to report that it was a great idea. Because the last person at a group mentorship meeting happened to be the hosts, I got some one-on-one face time with them that I wouldn’t ordinarily get to have.
Sharing your profile and accepting friend requests can be a good way to get to know more about your co-workers if you feel comfortable doing so. If you share photos and tag them in communal pictures or events, you start to build the connections. You can also use social media to find an an in-person or virtual event both of you can attend. If you connect via social media, you’ll have a way to chat with co-workers out of hours.
But you can have a little hang time with folks without committing to a whole extra meeting. It’s the virtual equivalent of lingering at the conference table to gossip. Kimberly Cummings, a career coach in NYC, advises trying to recreate as many of these casual professional encounters as possible to stay in the loop.
Building relationships with coworkers virtually
It stems from a lack of meaningful human connections, which are essential for our emotional well-being. To understand loneliness, it’s crucial to recognize the various types of connections that contribute to our sense of belonging. Making friends at work is all about replicating some of the things that used to serve us in our work lives within this new paradigm. For example, if you generally had a team outing on the last Friday of the month, coordinate team happy hours at that same time to celebrate the end of the workweek, says Cummings. Pre-pandemic, talking on the phone felt like something we did way back when Facetime wasn’t a thing.
When you work remotely, it takes effort to juggle a work-life balance. That quick final email becomes ten — before you know it, another hour is gone. Giving yourself strong boundaries can really help free you up to enjoy more of life outside of work. Friendships can build off the smallest things — it may begin with work-related conversations where you share similar opinions or experiences. These conversations will evolve so you talk about subjects outside of work. You may begin to feel happier disclosing information about your hobbies, interests, or family life.
Make an effort to meet your coworkers in person when you can.
For instance, nodding your head when people are speaking shows you are listening. When it’s your turn to speak, try to use your colleagues’ names. Halpern suggests saying, “I want to build on what Bob said, or, Susan makes a good point.” Halpern explains that people rarely use colleagues’ names and people love to hear their name. “Meeting up with people in-person helps a lot, especially for extroverts,” Duffy says.