Challenges for the nomadic worker: Part 2: In Touch
By Robert Slagter | In EN, knowledge base, research results, team blog | No comments.
In the series of posts on the main challenges for the nomadic worker, this part focusses on the challenge to stay in touch with the people that are important to you in your personal and professional network.
What is being “In Touch”?
Being in touch is the affective version of being in sync. It is the sense of “being connected” both with people you know well (your strong relational ties) as well as with people you are acquinted with (your weak ties). Important aspects are reassurance of the well-being of significant others, and the ability to let someone else know you are thinking of him or her.
Why is being “In Touch” important?
Being in touch is relational “glue”; it helps to:
- Build and maintain a social network.
- To maintain social cohesion in a team.
- To have peripheral (not goal oriented) awareness of what others are doing.
- To build up trust in social relationships.
Our research hypotheses about “In Touch”
- Face-to-face contact and mediated contact fulfill complementary roles for being in touch.
- Being in touch prevents “professional loneliness” (sensory isolation due to the impersonal nature of much information technology).
Our research questions about “In Touch”
- What are the roles of face-to-face and mediated contact in developing a sense of being in touch?
- How can social media help people to get in touch and to stay in touch?
- In what ways can “impersonal” IT be improved or enhanced to prevent professional loneliness?
Tags: in touch, social network, work life balance
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