Isolation in the workplace
The new problem in the remote ecosystem - isolation and a feeling of not belonging
One-on-one meetings are a staple between a manager and his/her direct reports. One complaint I keep hearing in these 1x1s - people feel isolated.
This wasn’t a problem that used to happen when we were in the office - we would socialize, and go out for chai, lunch and drinks.
But after COVID hit and our company decided to go remote - this has become an ever-increasing pain.
My gut always told me this was an important problem I should approach. Because the feeling of being a part of a tribe is what holds a startup team together.
I tried out many experiments to see what would solve this -
Setting up weekly chess tournaments to allow for socialization outside work
Setting up weekly sync-ups for everyone to catch up with each other's work
Holding mini-talks and workshops to increase engagement and kickoff knowledge sharing
But most of these ended up more or less not hitting the mark I set out to achieve.
The chess tournaments had a small troupe of engineers always participating.
But most of the members of my team wouldn’t take part.
Because they were not well versed in chess and would instead not participate than lose matches in public.
The weekly sync-ups were interesting in the beginning. But they started getting tiresome later on. Folks would often complain about joining and wouldn't engage actively in the conversation.
Mini talks and workshops helped in the context of knowledge sharing. But I often found people tuning out after about 10 minutes.
My attempts to have people take part in the conversation were for nought. It also didn’t instil a culture where other members of my team would offer to do a talk themselves or set up a workshop.
One of the things which helped in this area was the 6-monthly team building that we went through. Most of the people who attended had socialized and got acquainted quite well. It even allowed me to interact one on one with my teammates and allowed for connection on a much deeper level.
There is no easy way to make this happen more since the teams are spread all over India. So that solution goes out of the window.
I am still looking at viable options on what can be done.
One of the things which look interesting is a peer to peer 1x1s. It is to setup up 1x1s between different members of the teams.
One worry I have about this is that different teams often do not have specific topics to discuss.
So setting a plan for the conversations would be important - at least in the beginning.
I will create a few notion templates on agendas and set them up between members of my team.
I will set it up on a recurring basis every 2 weeks. And check up on the usefulness of these every once in a while in the normal 1x1s. If this works out all is well and good - otherwise, another thing to cut off.