Blog / Remote working works but we need to replicate relaxed office chat

Remote working works but we need to replicate relaxed office chat

If remote working fits your business but you’re still figuring on how to replicate that relaxed office chat. We’d love to hear from you. Because we are too!

Our Co-Founder, Tobias La Cour shares his views on a new working future for us and perhaps many others too.

At Somebody Digital, the consensus amongst our team is – we love remote working. In fact with an international workforce spread across the world and time zones that suit our global clients, we’ve worked this way for some time.

But now we’ve taken that next step to remote wonderland and left behind our London office. Aside from flexible access to some London meeting rooms, we don’t ever expect to go back to a pre Covid conventional office.

And yet…… This post pandemic transition is both an immediate opportunity and a work in progress. There are a few things we haven’t yet figured out. How do we re-create the relaxed workplace chatter? The casual conversation over coffee, the unplanned social collisions? These are the parts we’re working on. If other business owners have resolved this challenge – let us know!

There’s a lot of talk about work space right now. It’s interesting to listen to the debate about what defines an office of the future, the growth model of hybrid working and its impact on city economies.

For some businesses, flexible co-working space is the new answer providing opportunities for teams to hot desk or join together with colleagues for planned collaborative, brainstorming sessions. Our client https://secondhome.io/ offer creatively designed work spaces in London, LA and Lisbon, perfectly set up for this type of working. Perhaps for bigger firms, ‘hub and spoke’ space models are the answer where workers can drop into the old office HQ or even a new regional hub.

Last month a survey from VelocitySmartTechnology shared that 83% of UK workers think flexible working is here to stay.

Some firms however may have to go back to a fixed workspace. The process of training young recruits, work shadowing and effective graduate schemes need people to be working closely and learning directly from each other. That doesn’t seem to work so well over a video call. Although never say never! There are some exciting VR training innovators such as Reelyze currently developing tech products that may resolve this remote training challenge.

At Somebody Digital, we’re regularly exploring the best way of working for every team member. As things stand, we’re all enjoying remote working. We’ve replaced being in one space at the same time with weekly social catch ups. Nothing to do with work or clients but more about a human need to check in with each other. We’re sharing everything from TV programmes to holiday plans to bad jokes.

What’s certain is that we will never go back to the way things were.

The opportunities we have now could never have been imagined 5 years ago. I’ve moved an hour out of London and it’s been a blessing for me and my family. Other members of our team have done the same. Not having to commute to a London office every day is certainly serving a better quality of life for most of us.

But we also recognise there is a different need to fulfil. Our challenge now is to support and maintain that intangible social team cohesion and recognise that as we scale and recruit for the future, young talent may not feel as excited as we do about working from home! For people starting out on their careers, their first home doesn’t offer an ideal place to work and can feel isolating.

In the famous words of others, innovation is a journey and without change there is no innovation.

I’m hoping this conversation opens up some new change making ideas. Please feel free to share yours.