Take the same approach as home schooling. Community comes from engaging in other activities.
Technology
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
Childless man here, I work mostly remotely.
I don't miss any sense of community.
Same, but I do have my own community away from work and have always prioritized my friends over co-workers.
Come on, work being the sole source of community is the problem here. What are we even talking about?
Yes, but it's also the most logical place. What other activity do you dedicate so much time to? Maybe sleeping but it's hard to build a community around that.
According to my kids, candies are the most logical place to get most your nutritions from. Where else could you get so many calories?
If most of your time at work is spent socializing, couldn't you cut your work time and build your community elsewhere?
If most of your time at work you spent on honest hard-work working, how much community are you really building?
Cut you calories. Life doesn't happen at work.
I’m a childless man and I don’t miss the sense of community one bit.
I have more time to spend with the community that isn't tied to my income.
Also a father, so double benefits!
I know this a gross oversimplification, but:
"Remote working benefit those with a reason to stay home, but doesn't for those who don't have a reason to stay home" seems to be the general idea of the headline.
edit: I think this is the study they're talking about, please double check the source before quoting: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36718392/
This was also my experience during the main sweep of the pandemic. It was so great getting to cut the commute and be home. Something I have luckily managed to largely continue. Prior to the pandemic my kid was in daycare pretty much 7:30-5:30 so it was really nice to not have to do that, plus during our lockdown we used to go for a family walk at lunchtime.
While some of the single guys I worked with hated staying home and were straight back in the office the moment they were allowed.
Yeah I went 3 months without having a single face to face conversation with someone, it was pretty shit even with online gaming and discord.
My oldest has no children and works fully remote.
When the pandemic started, his company decided to have everyone work from home. They very quickly discovered that they were just as productive, and the owner decided it made sense to dump their office space.
A group of employees decided to go on vacation together, while still working. Since they are all remote, they didn't actually have to work from home. They got an Airbnb with good Internet, worked during the day, and saw the sites and had fun together after work.
If you're remote and you miss that sense of community, reach out to your coworkers and ask them if they want to hang out after work. It's possible they don't and you'll be disappointed. It's also possible that they feel the same way but didn't know they could do something about it.
Either you'll be the hero that saved everyone from their solitary existence, or you'll have to accept that they don't want to hang out with you.
Another person already said it, but the issue is the lack of third spaces. You don’t need to physically go to an office to get a sense of community. Working remotely makes it easier to get a sense of community if there are third spaces because you’re not stuck in a building for 8 hours. If your only source of community is your workplace, then you have other problems.
Oh, yes! I sure do miss that community made up of ass kissers and people who are just as miserable as I am! Or those 2-3 chill people with whom I meet for a chat weekly anyway, outside work hours because I sure as hell ain't in the mood for socialising while I'm wasting (at least) a third of my day and life doing busiwork for someone else!
41 year old male, no kids, no wife or girlfriend, been work from home for 5 years now. I've never been happier and more productive.
I get my sense of community from my friends not my coworkers. This study is B.S.
You know there are always outliers because research often looks at populations in general and not the exact experience of a specific person. Unless it’s a case study but that’s different.
Either way that’s a really good thing for you, the modern world makes it difficult to make and keep close to friends.
Can't wait until we figure out that improving society for the people in it, improves society overall.
As a childless man, they will have to pry my work from home out of my cold, lots of free time having hands.
childless men miss sense of community
Myself and everyone I know works remote. We're all childless/childfree and not a single one of us miss any community, we all feel there are zero downsides to it. This just comes across like propaganda to stop people working remote and return to office.
I work remote (Going on 9 years now) and I miss a sense of community. Do I want to stop working remotely? Hell no, screw that. But two things can be true the same time, I can enjoy and encourage them at work, dnd I can also miss a sense of community.
I think it's okay to hold this opinion because it's individual to everyone.
This just comes across as propaganda
Being dismissive and pulling the rhetoric that this is propaganda is toxic as fuck.
They're not distinguishing "remote work" from "working from home" which are two entirely different things. There are whole communities of remote workers who meet and work together around the world. I guarantee you that remote working men who take advantage of these kinds of environments have a better sense of community than men who are forced to go sit in a cubicle with a group of people like the cast of The Office with less sense of humor.
To me this highlights that many single men have problems with loneliness.
Remote work is a step in the right direction at least. In my case, I'm generally just too exhausted to bother going anywhere other than home and work, which definitely limits any socializing. Work culture isn't entirely to blame of course, but it sure isn't helping.
No we don't. Work is work, not fucking community.
I like my coworkers. They're cool. I just went to acro yoga with one, and go bouldering with another. We show up, talk shit, and get the job done - sometimes it's a good time. Sometimes we get our asses kicked. But that builds camradrie, too.
I will say, this is blue collar stuff. When I worked as a software dev, I definitely didn't care about spending much time with my coworkers.
i'm skeptical of any study that concludes anyone would rather deal with all the bullshit of working in the office rather than wfh
no one goes to work for the "community," which can also be gotten literally anywhere other than work
sounds like something corporate slavedriving senior executives decided they wanted a "study" on to prove people want to work in the office
I’m not going to deny that some people enjoy going to work and enjoy interacting with their coworkers, but this feels like it’s missing the forest for the trees. What about the affects commuting has on one’s civic engagement in their actual community?
“There’s a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.” https://archive.ph/2020.02.27-211238/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/there-and-back-again
Well then call me the outlier, cause I'm a childless man who has been happily working remote since before covid. I'd rather be jobless than go back to office work. I have a small group of non-work friends that I enjoy spending time with, and back when I did office work the majority of my friends were not work friends
This childless man loves his peace, quiet, and alone time.
But maybe I don't qualify as I have dogs, friends, and kickass neighbors.
I'm a childless man and FUCK that, the office isn't my social scene. I don't care to drive in there just to talk to the same people in person. ZERO point in doing that. We have meetings electronically and that's more than enough.
Best thing about working from home is stepping away from my desk, popping upstairs, and tossing my little baby boy up in the air a few times while he giggles and smiles.
This was me until I realized I didn't have a child and that I lived in the first floor.
Where was I going? What giggled as I tossed it into the air?
In office, I'm a chatty bitch. I have a habit of maybe over-socializing. For sure, my productivity goes down in the office. Oh, and people listen to me just as much WFH as they did in the office when it comes to work stuff.
At home, I can just turn on some music and focus on what I need to get done. I can work on my 20+ jira points I have every god damn sprint. Meetings (ad-hoc or planned) already cause delays for me and I'm already working to much (the highest so far, has been a 16-hour day).
I don't miss the 'sense of community' because there isn't one. Plus, most of my co-workers live in different states, and many in different countries. There's no in-person collaboration even if I'm in the office. It's still everything done over chat/video call.
My company, like so many others, went back on everything they said about WFH. They used to say how great it was because they could find talent from anywhere instead of being arbitrarily constrained by location. Like, obviously, the best talent doesn't just happen to live next to you. Then it moved to hybrid, for those all important in-person, face-to-face collabs and synergy and all the other bullshit LinkedIn BS you can spew. And now, they're doing RTO full on and even shaming those who work from home or would want to. Full-on bully tactics in meetings too. Even started shaming the upper mgmt, because their excuse was "well, other companies are doing it" so I hit back with the "if other companies were committing fraud, would we?" a spin on the "well if everyone else was jumping off a bridge, would you" I grew up hearing all the time. I actually brought that up in a corporate meeting, they never responded, so I'm taking that as a yes.... yes they would and will, so long as they figure they can get away with it (or the penalties don't outweigh the profits).
And then I find out Tim Walz (Minnesota Governor) is also for RTO... so I emailed his office, letting him know just how utterly disappointed in him I was, and to not expect my vote ever again.
Sorry, I'll get off my soapbox. I'm just truly passionate about this. WFH, I'm far less miserable on a day-to-day basis. Working in the office, I was in multiple car accidents going to and from work (none of which I caused). I've been in exactly 0 since WFH. No longer spending 1-2 hours a day just traveling, so I can work remotely, in an office. If I ever win the lotto, I'll be rich enough I could run for president and one of my pillars would be pushing businesses to utilize WFH if the position can do that. Fewer cars on roads, means less congestion for those who have to be onsite. There should be a noticeable decrease in vehicle-related accidents and fatalities.
Being childfree is its own reward.
The ability to work from home has given me innumerable benefits, but I must admit that as a very introverted guy who's been going through some shit, and who's go-to move during times of anxiety and depression is to distance themselves from everyone... yeah, sometimes I do miss my coworkers. A lot of them are pretty great people. Doesn't mean I'd rather spend 3 hours a day sitting in traffic to see them, just means I low-key miss someone to bitch with.
what is this study? why does the article not link to it and the data? what is the sample size, located where? waste of time post, downvoted.
They miss the sense of community because we no longer have 3rd places to hang out. For those unaware:
The Great Places Erased by Suburbia (the Third Place)
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=VvdQ381K5xg
https://youtu.be/VvdQ381K5xg
Itt: cognitive disonannce.
The study isn't bs. Lemmy users just won't accept that they don't even come close to representing the average individual.
Stop the fuck with "sense of community" and other crap.
I'm starting to understand that many people never felt the sense of community, in the workplace or otherwise. Yes it's possible.
The trick is that it doesn't depend on the company, it depends on the people. Last time it happened to me, we pretty much all quit together because we were frustrated at the company but kept being friends afterwards.