How do you connect with your colleagues when you rarely see them in person?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Stephanie Hughes.

Five years ago today, the WHO declared the COVID-19 outbreak was officially a pandemic.

This caused a widespread shift to remote work for many non-essential workers,

and people had to get used to seeing their colleagues mainly through a screen.

In recent years, some companies have required employees to return to the office full-time.

But remote work still remains a major part of many people's lives in a way that it wasn't in 2019.

Anita Blanchard studies remote work as a professor of psychological and organizational science at UNC Charlotte.

I asked her what's lost when workers don't interact with each other in the same physical space.

First of all, personal connections and friendships at work. I think it's interesting that we know that

conflict always happens in groups, but if the group has a stronger social connection, if they

trust each other more, the conflict has less of a negative effect on the group

performance than if they don't. And I am concerned that for groups that are all online and don't

have social connections, this normal conflict is going to have a more negative effect on the group.

And also, the communication, informal interactions between groups are missing. Because if you're only meeting with your group online and you're never meeting with other people, you haven't had those opportunities to gossip and figure out what's important and who you should trust and who you should not trust. Also, you're not sharing information about what you're doing, what your work is with someone

else who's doing a different project and making connections that could be a creative

problem-solving opportunity. There are a lot of great things about remote work in terms of

work-life balance. Aside from that, are there positive effects a tad on the way we work?

Yes. We know that it helps with pollution and congestion.

If people are working remotely, that's also very positive. And of course, work-life balance.

We've got some meta-analyses that show that working from home improves productivity. So it's not,

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