WLP262: Building a Routine and Building a Network When Working from Home
Hello and welcome to episode 262 of the 21st Century Work Life podcast, which today is dedicated to the homeworker. Pilar talks to Chris Coladonato (recorded November 2020), and dives deeply into her cultivated practices for staying connected to other people.
Before the interview with Chris, a quick reminder about our Podcasting for Connection service - podcasting is a great asynchronous tool that can help maintain a sense of belonging. Find out more via our contact form, if you are inspired by this conversation about working from home but never losing that touch of connection within your team.
04.29 Chris Coladonato
Chris Coladonato works in learning and development at a large enterprise, and is a great advocate for remote work. She is very active on social media and we’ve long enjoyed the insightful content she shares and discusses.
Chris has been working online for 12 years, since the company she worked for closed their office, so like many people more recently she didn’t have much of a choice back then. At first she did not enjoy the work from home experience for many reasons, and noticed that she missed the buzz of working around other people. But later she realised that she also missed the structure that ‘going to work’ brought to her daily experience as well. She had room for an office space at home, which doubled as a sewing room, but she missed the buffer her commute had provided to begin and end the work day.
This lack of boundaries made it hard to stop working in particular, so Chris created her own ‘virtual commute’, involving coffee, exercise, meditation and podcast listening - to create a clear end to the day and commencement of her personal evening, as well as a startup routine for the morning.
In time Chris realised that working from home didn’t mean she had to stay at home (back then), and she discovered working in a local library often created the right level background hum without interruption or distraction - she misses it a great deal just now, but has learned to trigger different mind-states by moving around her house: shifting to a different room for a burst of creative thinking, for example.
17.00 Teamwork and staying connected
The way Chris relates to and connects with colleagues has obviously changed a lot over the time involved, because technology has evolved so much. She set calendar reminders to connect with people individually, inside and outside of her team. This is now reinforced by her business collaboration tools, and she is very mindful about engaging in a conversation properly instead of just reacting:
“Rather than liking something, it’s stopping for a moment and really reflecting on what somebody shared or made a contribution, because that's what you would do face to face. At work you may wave at somebody, but you don't just wave at everybody and never say anything... So I do that, in the mornings, that's also part of my startup routine.”
Chris uses technology, in particular calendar reminders, to help make this happen.
Within her organisation of 15-20k people, they use an enterprise social network (Yammer) to keep everyone connected. She scans her newsfeed and groups, while she’s reading her feeds and updates connected to her work - sharing relevant information across groups, and ensuring she engages in groups outside of her own department within the business too. She often deliberately chooses to interact with someone she hasn’t worked with or connected with before, (which she definitely finds easier to do online than in person), and also re-engaging over time in the flexible way that online networking supports so well.
Particularly through the pandemic period she has sought one-to-one conversations and check-ins, again using reminders so as not to overlook anyone. She really embraces the value of building relationships steadily over time, and the power of small points of interaction to accumulate into a connection of true value.
Without the social and visual cues of face-to-face encounters, this requires intentionality - just as everything else online does. One way is to have a few moments of non-work connection at the start of a meeting, but many other fleeting possibilities are all around us, and they add up to meaningful social capital over time.
35.45 External networks and social media
Chris is also very deliberate about interacting outside her organisation, and she likewise blocks time for this daily, at different points through the day. Her routines are similar to internal networking: scanning newsfeeds and groups, bookmarking links, making time to reflect and engage properly rather than scanning and liking; she really works to build connection and genuine relationships.
She is wonderfully open to new sources of information and insight, expanding her network continually, and embracing the potential inherent in the fact that we can connect online with anybody and everybody in the entire world. A great example of this is that Chris met her future husband online - back in a day when this was a far less typical way of getting to know people.
As we have said so often at Virtual Not Distant, Chris’ strongest message is that connecting and communicating online requires intentionality. You have to figure out what you want, then make it so - plan it, schedule it, and make it happen. You can still be spontaneous, but it won’t just happen unless you carve out the time and space for it: One reason why planned spontaneity is a cornerstone of our Visible Teamwork framework (see Episode 211 for more on this.)
Speaking of LinkedIn, we had a great conversation over on our own page, about getting started with working remotely… We love this advice from all over our community (and the common thread about how it’s not about the tech).
However we also know that people are not always masters of the tech they need to use, and this often comes up in client work. So, we’re looking at offering one-to-one surgeries to fix this for you and help you get the most out of the tools you work with - would this be of benefit to you? Let us know!
Finally, if you love podcasting as much as we do, you’ll want to follow Adventures in Podcasting, for news about an exciting new book from Pilar coming soon.
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