Dear people struggling with “bonding with your team” in a remote work setting:

I don’t buy it. You can do this.

Are you one of the 100 million monthly active users on Threads? Do you read and/or interact with folks there, or on X, or via Instagram Stories, or here on LinkedIn, and it’s not a purely transactional interaction?

Have you ever had a conversation with someone over text messages, or in a Discord server, or in your DMs, that got funny and required zero in-person interaction to feel like you’re getting closer with someone?

Let me blow your mind: you can do these things with your coworkers too.

How?

Surprisingly effective and underrated tactic: Just having conversations not about work.

You can do this in Slack or Teams just fine. Talk about anything else on your mind:

• music you’re listening to
• something funny going on at your home or office or whatever
• what you’re wearing for a halloween costume
• some interesting or funny link that you saw
• asking others about the above things, or reacting to things they posted

Not sure where or how to do that? Chances are your people ops team may have created some kind of “nonwork” or “water-cooler” channel – start there. If it doesn’t exist, make one, ensure it’s open to the whole company, invite 5-10 of your coworkers there, and mention it in some other public channel so others can join if they like. If they don’t want to, that’s fine – don’t force it! That defeats the purpose. But if it’s organic and optional, some will come and hang out.

This isn’t to say that in person connection isn’t great - I’m meeting my team at Buffer in 2 weeks and I’m thrilled to be doing so. But I also feel pretty close to them already because we have fun discourse alongside the work discourse. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive.