For those of you who work remotely, how do you find the times when you finally meet some of your colleagues face to face?
For me it’s pretty awkward; they can be people I’ve been through a lot with, maybe shared a laugh or two with, but still it feels like meeting a stranger. Do you even need to go say “hi”? It’s not a first meeting, but also, it is.
Often I don’t even recognize them, as they are bigger or smaller than I imagined (one colleague of mine turned out to be a muscular 6ft+ guy, but you wouldn’t have guessed from his voice and that his head is normally right at the bottom of his video feed), or just look different somehow.
Funnily enough, I am planning on meeting a remote colleague in real life for the first time this Friday. We’ve worked together for several years, always remote but both of us in CA, and he then for family reasons had to move back to the East Coast.
I will be visiting nearby and reached out to him, and he said that Friday is his last day - the company didn’t support him working remotely, so he had to resign. So I’ll be taking him to lunch and expensing it as a thank you for his partnership.
Two or three times per year my subdivision group does something (bowling, eating somewhere, going to the beach, trivia night, whatever) and I hop the train and join them for it.
Back in the early 90s, I worked for a small Japanese documentation company. I worked with a number of freelancers and almost all our conversations were by phone.
Occasionally we would meet in person and it would always be really weird as their weren’t what I had imagined.
I agree that appearances on Zoom can be misleading. One time we started off a remote meeting with “How tall are you?” as an icebreaker. One woman said that she was 4’11", which surprised everyone. She had a loud voice and a commanding presence, and maybe a big head?
Between Covid and my retirement (about four years), this happened a lot. We were routinely (eg a few times a week) discussing things virtually via MS Teams, with people from all over, including the US, the UK, Australia, across Canada, and various other countries. People flew in from time to time for different working groups or progress meetings. For us, it wasn’t weird at all and, for first time in-person meetings, we would quite informally introduce ourselves to each other with comments like “hey, it’s great to meet you in person. How was your flight? etc”
Although, it might have not been weird because a significant proportion of us were former military, and it’s very easy for a Canadian former naval officer, and some American, Brit and Aussie former military to get familiar with each other in conversation.
when this happened to me I felt the need to assert dominance over the tribe so in the business room where we had our training session I confiscated all the pencils and boxes of kleenex sitting on all the tables and hoarded them at my own desk while making angry yelping sounds whenever people made eye contact. my promotion to team lead is next Tuesday.