How teams have worked over the past years and what we’ve lost along the way.

I’ve worked from home, to varying degrees, for the best part of twenty years now and had been traveling to my head office for meetings on average once a month. For the past couple of years I’ve been to the office once and most of the team that I work with, as well as the wider organisation, just don’t go into the office anymore.

I’ve previously written about the advantages for people and organisations of the working from home model, and the balance of power and connections that this brings. I had thought most of what was potentially missing by working from home was the lack of support and connection for younger people who are starting out, but there’s definitely something else that is missing from our work life as the consequences of this new approach plays out.

I work in a relatively small team who all know each other well and used to have semi regular long lunches which really provided the social and professional glue that helped to bond the team together. The professional relationship is still there, and the support and advice between people in the team may actually be better, in some respects, than it had been before.

We’ve tried over the past couple of years to do the virtual drinks, catchups, and farewell parties all to varying degrees of success, but this…