Isolation in the Workplace

While the pandemic is often viewed as the starting point of widespread work from home trends, manufacturing already had employees working across facilities and continents for global businesses. While the way many corporate employees worked changed during the pandemic, some companies had an expectation to return to more frequent in-person meetings. As the new normal of work is being developed, companies are exploring what it means to attract and keep their talent. For manufacturers, there is an increased number of hybrid or remote positions across corporate roles who are not coming together at the same frequency, and are not “as connected to the business,” cited a director for a U.S.-based motion control manufacturer. Currently, companies are trying to assess the impact of employees residing farther away from facilities than pre-pandemic hires.

To learn more about how manufacturers are addressing the corporate culture in the post-pandemic workforce, we gathered data from more than 120 manufacturers in non-operations-based roles. Many of these manufacturers interact with team members working in either a remote or hybrid role and are in that position as well. While belonging is a widespread focal point, nobody has yet found the secret way to manage the feeling across staff. Notably, the survey found those who worked in office the most reported feeling the most isolated. This highlights that being among the few in an office while others are working from home presents unique challenges. 

The Breakdown of Connectedness 

Across those in corporate roles, 41% of respondents have their employees working remotely two days a week. This is generally at the discretion of the role and under permission of management within an individual department. Those within compliance and legal departments were spread mostly between one and four remote workdays, but the tax department had the highest percentages of four and five remote workdays according to our respondents. Despite the shift to remote workdays, 81% of survey respondents reported that productivity has either increased or stayed the same. However, feelings of isolation were cited across the board regardless of remote workdays. Knowing efficiency is little changed, how are manufacturers cultivating a sense of connected culture?

Number of Days Working Remotely Impacts Feelings of Isolation or Belonging

Source: Manufacturers Alliance member survey, 2024.

Ironically, those who were in the office more often felt the most isolated. This could be attributed to the preference in ideal work environment. Those in-person are still having to make virtual calls (meeting via video calls has risen by 50% since 2020), and many employers have shrunk office square footage, limiting capacity for all to gather, engage, and connect. Without relationship-building or interpersonal interactions, what does going to the office offer? There are individuals who “simply just want to get out of the house,” observed one director, but satisfaction rates might hit a standstill if individuals are not getting socialization benefits from in-person interactions.  

Lyne Pagé, Director of Internal Audit at Bombardier Recreational Products (BRP), observed how “[newer employees] aren’t looking to invest in a relationship with their new employer.” BRP has a strong history of community culture, having traditionally kept all their staff closer to the primary office, which was shared with operations. As they have expanded and workplace occupancy shifted with COVID, the city-centric office grew. However, Pagé noted, “if you’re in that office, you don’t smell the manufacturing, you don’t hear the noise of the machines,” shifting the culture of the organization. On the positive side, remote roles open up the opportunity for more diverse applicants to apply rather than being limited to a certain geographical area.

In addition to a potentially weaker connection to the company, employees are less likely to engage with colleagues outside of work communications. According to our survey, respondents estimated that only 38% of employees met weekly with a colleague or team for a virtual or in-person social gathering, such as for a drink or meal, and 18% reported that they rarely or never met with colleagues for social connection.

Does social interaction matter? Many survey respondents reported lack of informal conversations, lack of face-to-face interaction, and limited social interactions as barriers to a sense of belonging in a remote setting. They also highlighted challenges such as reduced team cohesion, communication challenges, and difficulty in building trust.

Re-Emphasizing Communications

Manufacturers, like most industries, must deal with variation in working locations. To bridge connectivity, many of those surveyed have dialed into targeting communication and interactions. Those with in-person and hybrid work models are utilizing mandatory days in the office to hold team meetings or collaborative bonding activities. For benefits or encouragement, many provide food or some type of bonus. S&C Electric Company’s Finance & Accounting team found many team members wanted more in-person interaction, so they regularly hold lunch and learns and other interactive opportunities. These focus on understanding the business and learning about each other. 

Top 5 Tools to Enhance Productivity and Communication

Source: Manufacturers Alliance member survey, 2024.

Many respondents with hybrid or remote employees shared that their companies used communications tools and video conferencing on a routine basis—although the consistency of “cameras on” was mixed. One manufacturer said they try to “be accessible via chat, phone, text, etc. when employees need to interact, just like an in-office ‘open door.’” Lyne Pagé of BRP meets with her team three times a week for 15-minute touchpoints to encourage social interaction and team camaraderie, in addition to their structured team meeting, a longstanding practice. 

Surprisingly, effective and very effective communication trended higher the more days remote. Over half of respondents in the 3-4, and 5-day category reported very effective communication, and those with very effective communication cited having less of a challenge with limited face-to-face interaction and less feelings of isolation. Those working fully remote generally have a different mindset about what is required to create connections and are often more prepared to take full advantage of in-person interactions.  

One manufacturer shared, “We are a remote company, so it's a way of life. Budget has been provided for in-person meetings. Most people travel at least once a year for such a meeting, with many traveling about once a quarter.” Another shared: "Our organization is working hard to keep people feeling connected and those near offices do have more opportunities now. We have also resumed in-person meetings, such as finance or sales conferences, to bring teams together. It's a worthwhile investment."

Yet another summed it up very efficiently: “Give employees a reason to be in the office.”  

Leadership, Training, and Encouraging Engagement

At the team level, we found that diversity and human resource departments are building a strategy by deploying training on managing a remote team and by having in-person meetings intentionally to build trust.

“We've found it to be critically important to have regular, intentional in-person gatherings to help build rapport and trust within teams,” said one manufacturer. “Also, for our hybrid employees, having a structured approach has been helpful with a formal remote work program that provides guardrails for managers to follow versus just telling people, ‘We want you in the office around 3 days a week.’”  

Marketing and sales emphasized accessibility, and while most of them liked remote work, they still encouraged being in person and leadership opportunities. Compliance and legal focused more so on the importance of a team, wanting junior-level remote workers on teams to have more leadership or supervision.  

Many manufacturers have noted the challenges of on-boarding new employees and connecting more junior staff. One respondent shared “More seasoned professionals make the change to remote work fairly easily. They know what to do and do it. Those professionals early in their careers find remote work difficult as they miss out on hands-on learning and social interactions. They are less productive, need more coaching and handholding and monitoring, and benefit more from in-person events, whether for training, problem-solving, or social.”  

Other manufacturers agreed and mentioned similar observations. “The challenges facing remote workers who are more junior in their career are the greatest as they miss out on opportunities to receive mentoring, training, and build community."

BRP’s Pagé shared, “It’s more difficult for newer people, to transport that to a sense of belonging as you’re an implant coming into an organization with its own vocabulary, its own habits.”  

And what about those managers overseeing hybrid or remote workers? That has unique challenges as well. “It is difficult to develop leadership qualities in remote work employees,” said one manufacturer. “Leadership and leadership qualities are developed through observation."

Some organizations are starting to look at training to address this growing issue. "We are finding a significant gap in our managers' ability to manage a remote workforce," said one manufacturer.

Since engaging employees has become more critical than ever, companies are spending a lot of energy to figure out what works. Gone are the days of virtual water coolers or virtual happy hours that once gathered many colleagues online as they have gotten stale. Informal chat channels for vacation pictures, family updates, sports, or other topics that people want to share ebb and flow in popularity. There is an ongoing evaluation of what can be done to bring together people across virtual formats.

We heard this at the team level too. So far, engagement tactics have been very decentralized. Who should be responsible for engagement? For Lyne Pagé of BRP, she votes middle-to-upper managers: “It’s my responsibility to integrate my employees and make them feel comfortable,” encouraging a sense of community and employee engagement to not isolate people at home nor the office.  

“We’ve struggled in making the managers responsible for engagement in alternative working space teams,” shared a director. It only gets more complex as decisions including which days people worked from home are up to the individual employee/their manager, with what is best for the business and best for the team in mind. The emerging strategy is to focus on the needs of the department or team, for example aligning financial due dates with in-person preparation, or non-quarter-end team activities for investor relations.  

Greg Messing, Director of Audit, Risks, and Controls at S&C Electric Company shared that engagement surveys can give valuable and actionable feedback. “We have a lot of different connecting points to make sure that we are understanding what challenges are out there and what team members think about things like this,” said Messing. When S&C’s Finance & Accounting team began to return to the office after the pandemic, team members – especially newer ones – requested more in-person interaction. “And I felt good about addressing that because I felt like when other companies are requiring it, saying we need everyone in here four to five days a week to do something, that's going to draw a lot of questions for a lot of reasons from a lot of different people. But when it's the people, the team members identifying it saying we want to be in person, we want to meet each other more, have lunch, wherever it is, then it's very easy to execute that because it's what people want. And that led to many of the in-person initiatives that we have now."

Engagement surveys have highlighted other challenges as well. To drive engagement on its Finance & Accounting team, S&C established Engagement & Culture Initiative (ECI) teams focused on building relationships, improving communication and targeting specific areas such as onboarding. The ECIs proved to be a way for people who do not work together regularly to collaborate on topics that impact everyone while also providing leadership opportunities to those interested.

Reimagining Culture and Communications

Not everyone in manufacturing works in a hybrid or remote role, but those who are or have team members in those positions may have observed a greater difference in the company culture, changing and evolving over time. Lyne Pagé has seen the organizational culture change. “I can see our culture, although not decreasing, it’s not as strong as it used to be,” she said. Newer, younger hires prefer to work at home. “Even sometimes when they come to work in the office, they have huge headphones on and don’t talk to anyone during the day.” She still believes there should be an effort put into socialization, and so does Greg Messing, Director of Audit, Risks, and Controls at S&C. He believes employee engagement across levels, departments and locations is a key driver of the company’s success.

The changes in boundaries for staff and the corporation are hard to navigate. Our interviewees shared how teams or departments are making decisions on what works best for them, and it is all about finding a balance between the benefits and negatives of different working locations. How do you measure what is working best? Or, as one interviewee asked, “How do I measure meaningful collaboration?” Manufacturers are still working through these cultural changes within the workplace and within their workforce, but they acknowledge it is a different space now than it has been before.

“I think a lot of it has to do with the individual, and the manager needs to be able to recognize if an employee is in need of more informal interactions or in-person collaboration,” said one manufacturer.” Remote work isn't for everyone, but the freedom it creates for those that can work effectively, remote is one of the best benefits a company can offer."

Want More?

Members can view the full results from the survey, Cultivating a Sense of Belonging in a Remote Environment.