Is it harder to build up fundamental soft skills in a remote environment?

Question

Do you think that by being in a remote setup, it would be harder to learn skills like communication, building trust, and aligning people behind decisions? I'm interested in these skills for my work of course, but I also do have aspirations of building my own startup someday and I imagine these skills are useful there too.

Alex Chiou · Accepted Answer

I definitely think remote work makes all these things harder, especially building trust. Rahul and I are building a startup right now, and even though it's hard to concretely/mathematically deduce this, I feel like we would move substantially faster if we met up in person in a stable office every day.

Some additional thoughts here:

In general, anything involving other people is harder in a remote environment. Losing the body language, physical proximity, and convenient ability to have a conversation is really painful.
It's just really hard aligning people over Zoom. It's difficult to come off as a warm presence that genuinely seeks the best for everybody when you're just some pixels on the screen.
To help with this, the most obvious "fix" is to just to meet more in person. On top of that, I think you need to "subsidize" things by spending more time together virtually, mainly through 1 on 1s and team meetings.

Is it harder to build up fundamental soft skills in a remote environment?

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