How do remote workers develop relationships?

John Riordan is “passionate” about remote working. That’s not because he wants to sit around in his pyjamas all day living out a cliche, but because it enables him to have a healthy work-life balance while working for a billion-dollar e-commerce company. “I live and work a mile from where I grew up in Cork, even though I am working for a major international business,” he says. “Without remote working, I could not do this.”

Riordan is director of support for Shopify, a platform to create an online store, which has more than 300 staff in Ireland. Shopify is unusual in that it does not have a bricks-and-mortar office here, yet it has staff in every county. “Working from home is not a substitute for childcare, elder care or pet care. It needs to be taken seriously by the company and the staff,” he says. To that end, Shopify has a remote-working policy. The aim is to create the feeling of belonging.

First, the job interview is conducted using Zoom video-conferencing technology. Then all the training for support staff is done online too. The difference is that new hires are taken on in groups of 10, each known as a squad. Their training takes four to six weeks of full days in video-conference.

“It’s a virtual classroom,” Riordan says. “They get to know each other as well as they would in real life.” Once they start work, the same squad works together. So they can chat each day – online of course. “The squad starts their shift together and ends it together. They are in constant contact.”

Shopify is just part of a growing trend, according to Cian Collins, a founder of Grow Remote, an initiative started last year to bring together remote workers whether they are at home, in a coffee shop or a co-working space. It estimates there are more than 216,000 doing it. “The idea was to bring companies and people together and just create awareness of the benefits of remote working and opportunities available,” Collins says.

Benefit rural development

Co-founder Tracy Keogh recognised how this could benefit rural development. “Grow Remote went from being a WhatsApp group to a fully-fledged team with a proper website and chapters all over Ireland,” says Collins, who runs his tech company Frankli from Sligo. Frankli supplies a platform to manage in-house and remote staff through regular check-ins, feedback, recognition and goal-setting.

“With the advent of 5G, the widespread adoption of communication platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, the growth in demand for remote working is only going in one direction,” says Collins.

It can be valuable to companies too, according to a US study from 2017 that surveyed 7,000 job applicants. It showed that the average worker is willing to accept 8 per cent lower wages for the option to work from home. Abodoo, a recruitment platform for remote workers, estimates that companies using only remote workers save €11,000 per worker a year.

Technology can be key and Jonny Cosgrove, who runs Grow Remote’s Dublin chapter, has an answer. His Meetingroom.io platform enables companies to run their business from anywhere, with employees anywhere using virtual meetings. “I call it location-less working,” says Cosgrove. “I have a fully-remote team based in Dublin, Cork, China and Spain. But they can work anywhere that has a connection.”

Cosgrove has clear rules of engagement for staff. “We make sure everyone attends the meeting the same way. We don’t use video. We use voice calls. Video-conferencing can be a learned skill,” he says.

Behaving like ordinary colleagues is important too. “We ‘see’ each other and get in a room together every day,” he says, though he is referring to a virtual room. “The first 10 minutes is always water-cooler conversation about something like Game of Thrones characters.”

There is also time for fun. “We log onto a programme online and play games with each other.”

It means that when they meet in real life, the relationship is already there.

Growremote.ie, abodoo.com, meetingroom.io