Thread by @daytonmills

It’s been nearly a year since the forced work-from-home experiment, and unfortunately not much has changed.

The current technology most rely on - Zoom, Google Meets, Slack - all seem stuck. If this is the destiny of remote work, many people would rather pass…

To them, it means piling on Zoom fatigue. Feeling isolated from coworkers. Actually, feeling isolated in general.

Some people freak out when they think remote work is the future.

Like, really freak out. They express completely valid concerns, like this guy below:

“I work remotely, and no amount of Zoom can ever substitute for real face to face interaction. I’m struggling to keep it together mentally with hours of total isolation for months on end. If we're never going back to the office, that's a horrible future as far as I’m concerned.”

This person shares the same anxiety as millions of other remote workers. They battle feelings of isolation, exhaustion, and frustration. This stems from one central issue: while working remotely, it’s hard to feel close to people. This is known as psychological distance.

Psychological distance is the perceived distance one feels with objects, circumstances, and people.

Research reveals three types of psychological distance:

Spatial Distance - How a person perceives distance in terms of space.

Temporal Distance - How a person perceives distance in terms of time.

Social Distance - How a person perceives distance in terms of relationships.

Blended together, these three aspects are what make us feel close - or far away - from others. With the current technology, psychological distance is vast.

Workers don’t share the same “space” aside from a shared screen on Zoom or Slack channel.

Time is tricky, as they’re not able to perform immediate actions such as tapping someone on the shoulder or knocking on someone’s office door.

And for relationships, it’s hard to feel like we can relate to our co-workers via a screen. Especially considering how it can be intimidating to reach out to people online.

These factors make for a sub-par, mediocre interconnected online experience. And it’s not only for remote employees. It’s for remote students, long-distance relationships, or just about anyone using the internet to reduce physical distance.

Psychological distance isn’t the only thing modern tech is lacking.

It also has to do with co-experience.

Co-experience is a person’s experience created through social interaction under product or system usage. Like playing Minecraft with someone across the world.

Both players are united by a single context - Minecraft - and are having a shared experience thanks to this product.

There are three elements of co-experience:

Participation: The understanding that one’s participation in a space makes up a part of the whole experience. (Ex: Hitting someone in Minecraft hurts the other player.)

Cognitive Communion: Individual shares knowledge with others. (Ex: Everyone knows that a creeper is to be avoided in Minecraft.)

Resonant Contagion: Influencing and being influenced by the experiences of others to agree on the same opinions. (Ex: No one crafts gold pickaxes in Minecraft, because they learned from another user it’s a crappy tool.)

Assimilated together - participation, cognitive communion, and resonant contagion - make for a rich co-experience. Rich co-experience makes us feel closer to one another and gives us the feeling we’re under the same roof.

With remote work, co-experience is relatively weak.

The current software connecting workers isn’t particularly immersive or social.

In zoom we attempt to create inhabited space by changing our background to a picture of a conference room.

For remote workers, naturally, this meaningful place would resemble that of an office.

While updating your Zoom background is certainly a….start, it’s not the best way to provide a meaningful place for users. It’s not interactive or immersive.

To change this, technology must aim to reduce psychological distance and enrich co-experience.

When we surveyed the current state of remote work, the classic players come to mind. Slack channels, Zoom calls, Microsoft teams, etc. None of these tools feel like the future.

They’re missing a lot of elements when it comes to making us feel closer to one another.

We feel isolated because we aren’t sharing a space that feels relevant. We feel a bit invisible and less valuable to the team because our actions aren’t perceived in real-time.

In short: we’re missing the appropriate context and actions to achieve high-quality interactions.

At Branch, we’ve created a space that encapsulates all of these elements. Surface-level, Branch is a virtual office for distributed teams. But it’s much, much more than this.

Branch is a user-built world that draws on multiplayer gamer culture and carries contextual meaning.

If you have a question you can directly walk over to someone and talk to them. If you’d like to enter someone’s office, you can knock on their door. If you’re waiting to chat with someone, you can signal your availability by hanging out at the water cooler.

If you have been struggling to work remotely over the past year, I invite you to come try out branch.

I promise you, remote work doesn’t have to make you feel like the person I quoted above.

We’re saving the world from zoom fatigue.

branch.gg