Why Remote Work Doesn’t Mean Being Alone

The concept of being part of a distributed or remote team, might be seen like you’re destined for a life spent alone, but that isn’t necessarily the case.

Working remotely can mean that you get out more, meet new people and live a more balanced life, you just need to ensure you make a little effort to stop yourself from always working alone.

Work in different places

Working remotely doesn’t mean you have to work from home, or even in the same places everyday. To keep things fresh you can try working in a different environment.

If you work from home most days, just going somewhere like your local coffee shop to work instead can help boost your productivity and stop things from getting stagnant.

Co-Working Spaces

Going to co-working spaces is another way of mixing up your working environments, and another great place to meet a mix of interesting people. This can be somewhere you work from regularly, on a daily basis or maybe just a couple of times a week when you want a change of scenery.

Meetups

If you happen to live somewhere that has lots of Meetups, then think about heading along to one. This lets you get a change of scenery, meet other people with from similar working backgrounds with different expertise, getting you to meet new people and you never know, you might learn something :P

Company Retreats

Getting everyone together in a new location helps build team morale and is great way of bringing your colleagues together and letting them get know each other in reality (rather than through a screen with chat systems and video calling).

The ability to do this will depend on how where your team is distributed and if it’s something that can be organised, but if you can it’s definitely be worth it. For companies like Buffer it helps bring the team together and lets you truly get to know each other.

Tools and apps

And of course, there are the tools and apps that your team uses, they make a difference to how connected (or disconnected) you feel from the rest of your team.

Remote collaboration apps like PukkaTeam, helps bridge that disconnect you have from your team, video conferencing tools such as Skype, help with better understanding when needing to call your team as they provide that essential visual element that lets you see physical gestures as well as emotions.

How do you keep yourself from feeling alone when working remotely, let us know in the comments :)

Want to improve your team communication and collaboration, try PukkaTeam free, and bring your team, together.