Spinoff to Remote Position

During the pandemic, I started working from home. I thought I would hate it, but I actually liked it! In my opinion, what made it easier was that everyone in my group had been working together for a while, so we all knew each other. Even on Teams calls, we were able to joke around with each other and have a "fun" atmosphere.

But, if I had to start a brand new job remotely, I think it would be really hard to get to know people and get into a "groove" as a group. Has anyone started a new job in a remote setting? What's the "office culture" been like?

Just curious -- I'm not changing jobs (even though I have to go back full time to the office on Monday)! LOL!

Spinoff to Remote Position

I've always worked from home at least part time. I've been WFH since March, 2020 and do not ever have to go back to the office. We've always had remote employees.
During the last 2 years, we've hired a ton of new employees- many will be remote indefinitely. We do almost all our calls to each other on Teams. It's how I've "met" at least 20 new employees this year. We always had a great office culture and try to keep that up even now (I'm in management). we do random Trivia calls- we'll call a few employees who don't work on the same team and ask trivia questions & send out GCs as a reward. We have a lot of teams meetings, funny emails going around, etc. We even did a virtual pet parade- everyone sent in pics of their pets and then we got on a teams call, did a slide show and everyone got to speak about their pets. It's not exactly the same, but it works as long as you have the right employees. A lot of the people we've hired are young (like early 20s) and it's their first job, so it's been a little hard and some of them were let go, but for the most part, we haven't had many issues introducing new employees.

Re: Spinoff to Remote Position

I started a new fully remote position in Nov 2020. It's with the same company I've worked at for 15 years, however I've only worked with 1 other person on my team previously and maybe one or two other people in the entire department. It's a little difficult as you can't gauge people's personalities over text as much since we mostly communicate through MS Teams. We do have two video calls a week for the entire team and the manager/supervisor do try to make "fun" things. We all dressed up in our Halloween costumes on our video call before Halloween. Then they raffled off prizes- gift cards to target or amazon. We had one video call where everyone brought their pets. Those things help to break the ice. But it's hard because these people don't work closely to me- I mean my team is NY, NJ, CH, and TX so we're all over the map and we don't have much in common.

ETA: I wouldn't change it for a minute though. I NEVER want to go back to the office!

Message edited 1/1/2002 1:24:21 PM.