This is an anonymous post from an Elpha member.

I'm the only remote person on my team and I'm struggling

anonymous·Oct 07, 2019

hi everyone. My team is all in-person except for me. At first I thought it would be just fine, but I'm starting to find it stressful. It feels like I'm missing important face time and that's giving me anxiety. Do you have any tips for how to make it work if you're THE remote person on your team?

kuan·Oct 07, 2019

Hi OP! I'm sorry to hear you're struggling. Being the only remote person on any team is VERY hard. Have you been in that position for a while? My first thought is to increase your face time with the rest of your team. It's extra work to build and maintain remote relationships, but one way to make sure you're in the loop, if that other people know you just as well as those around them. It's not a small amount of work, but definitely worthwhile investment. Another idea is to travel to the HQ on a frequent basis (at least every 2 months or so). These are my observations from what my former colleague did that was extremely successful to being one of the few remote people on the team.

renaobrien·Oct 08, 2019

It's not easy OP, but kudos to you for reaching out to find ways to work through the stress. First let's talk about the face time, and the anxiety the lack of it gives. What specifically about it makes it difficult? For example, is it feeling heard? Or just general companionship, etc?

LaurenPatti·Oct 08, 2019

I'm also the only remote person on my team (I'm in NYC and the rest are in Memphis). Thankfully, my small team has been super supportive since I was hired 6 months ago.One advantage I've had is being an early hire — it gave me time to build the right collaboration platforms into our workflows so that when new staff joined, those habits were baked in to their work. I've found that I feel most anxious when my colleagues don't know what I'm working on and I don't know what they're working on. To solve that, I've started time-clocking my calendar to show how I plan to use my time each day (and I edit to reflect how my time was actually used if it doesn't match the plan). I haven't been able to get my colleagues to follow suit, but we did begin a Monday check-in call so that everyone can discuss their priorities for the week. Additionally, we send a Friday afternoon slack message describing what we accomplished for the week and what we need to carry over to the next week.Nothing new here, but these platforms have been super helpful to us:* Slack (of course)* GDocs* Asana* We always schedule Google Hangout Meetings (Zoom/Skype etc also work) instead of phone callsWe tried Tandem but it didn't stick for us. I do see huge potential there though — there's a free trial! https://tandem.chat/Finally, I try to make it to Memphis to meet with the team at least once a quarter (for 3-4 days).

joyceguanwest·Nov 14, 2019

Hi there, I've managed large teams of remote workers before and there are a number of techniques for making this is great relationship. I'm a career coach and happy to chat; you can book me at www.calendly.com/joyceguanwest. You can view my coaching profile and reviews here: www.hireclub.com/coaches/joyce-west