09/13/2021

Making Collaboration Work in the WFH Era

Organizations must support collaboration among remote workers

The past year and a half has been hard on chance encounters in the workplace. Virtual meetings can do some things well, but the tools of remote work have yet to recreate the the pleasant surprise of making a new acquaintance in the hallway of a conference center or reconnecting with a colleague you have not seen for a while. Work-from-home (WFH) environments don't easily foster random connections with people from different departments, especially new arrivals. That's a problem, because many leaders have argued that such connections are the source of innovations that help organizations thrive.

So, how do you foster those in-person connections when a lot of workers, quite understandably, aren't yet ready to have them?

In an article last week in The New York Times, Claire Cain Miller dove into some of the research around chance meetings and creativity, in response to JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon's comment that "remote work virtually eliminates spontaneous learning and creativity because you don't run into people at the coffee machine." Dimon has a point.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Associations Now.