Home, But Not Alone

Many of us are working remotely and feeling isolated. Here’s what you can do to stay more connected to your team

- Lindsay De Freitas

When she was instructed to work from home at the start of lockdown, Tamsyn* relished the thought of not having to wake up at the crack of dawn and sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic to get to her office.

Instead, her mornings were leisurely. She’d get out of bed just before 9am, make coffee, then settle down on the couch with her laptop.

But now, more than six months into lockdown, she says the novelty has worn off. In fact, Tamsyn says she’d give anything to spend a day at the office catching up with colleagues in the kitchen or talking through upcoming projects in the boardroom.

“It was really awesome in the beginning. I just felt so relaxed – and, honestly, I hoped they’d let us all work from home forever,” says Tamsyn, an operations manager based in Cape Town. “But after a few weeks I realised I felt really isolated from the team.”

Things became even more complicated when she was promoted to a more senior role three months into lockdown.

“To begin with, I’m quite new at the company – I only started in January. Although I didn’t yet know my colleagues well, I’d interacted with them for a few months and that made communicating remotely okay. But after the promotion things became quite difficult.”

Tamsyn felt herself becoming paranoid about every interaction, retyping emails over and over to change the way she phrased things because she was worried about the tone she might be conveying.