This article originates from How to avoid loneliness when you work entirely from home?

Summary:

Working from home can save us from the rush-hour traffic and eliminate the tedious and intense office life. but without different colleagues surrounding us, we may lose control of our job, work inefficiently and feel being left out of the world.

How can we combat loneliness and maintain positive relationships with our colleagues? The author gives us three advices.

First, seek out an online community to share and work together.

Second, communicate with your coworkers through videos like Skype or Zoom meetings so that you could read their body languages which helps you to strengthen the liveness.

Finally, use small talks to promoting your relationships and then make the subsequent interactions go more smoothly. So we could learn more about the personal lives of our colleagues. Small talks are the lubricant before the formal communication.

Aside from the above, we can eliminate the loneliness by spending time with our pet while working from home.

Response:

Working from home has been advocated for many years but now seldom people could work at their own house. And not all work are appropriate for working from home.

Even now most of us are working at offices, the technology has reduced the chance of our face-to-face communications with our colleagues sharply. We talk about our works or even having a meeting by WeChat or Dingding. I talk with my colleagues on WeChat most of the time although we sit next to each other. Colleagues have become the surroundings or background of our work. The office provides us a fixed place to focus on our work but the real connections are online. We won’t feel so lonely while working at office.

Our surroundings and background are furniture, flowers or our pets while working from home. In some degree, what we would conquer is the loneliness instead of the lack of face-to-face communications with colleagues. So it’s rather important for us to control our mind and create a comfortable surroundings.

During weekends, I’ll go to one café or the library to read or work. Staying at home will distract my attention. I enjoy the kind of noisy surroundings created by people while working. The noise will make me calm and concentrate on what I’m doing.

Creating your own proper surroundings will help us to eliminate the loneliness while working from home.