Work in an office setting implies that interacting with colleagues on a daily basis is a given. Employees connecting briefly over coffee chats, walk to the car park or birthday cakes was a given, even if they didn’t work in the same team.

With remote working and virtual channels over the pandemic, things have changed. Employees communicate with colleagues they share tasks with. Many have found their work worlds have shrunk, when there isn’t any work-related purpose to reach out to colleagues who aren’t a associated with their workloads. Colleagues who used to play small but significant parts of office lives are now effectively ghosts.

With a 2021 study at Microsoft showing that many remote employees feeling less connected to their teams, it’s clear that this impacts workers. Finding solutions to restore these post-pandemic problems is key to prolonged wellbeing at work. Workers had the tendency to hang onto prevalent connections than making new ones, making groups static.

Though short check-ins and long meeting done virtually were productive, downtime in terms of a casual chat, spontaneous conversations or a moment to joke had all been sucked out. This particularly impacted extroverts who felt a loss in many ways. A 2021 survey by Indeed, a job-site revealed that “73% of people missed socialising in person and 46% missed work-related side conversations” occurring in the office. A reason could be these social ties people find at the workplace adds to their feeling of belonging and attachment at work, thus adding to their happiness and positivity.