Build a robust network from home

Work-from-home flexibility can help with meeting new people

Most of us know that we should spend more time networking. We know that a robust network can help with finding jobs, landing clients, and figuring things out. Plus, it’s fun to have people who are cheering for us and to have professional friends that we get to watch succeed too.

But when life gets busy, it is always easier not to reach out. People who work from home, in particular, may feel like they don’t spend a lot of relaxed, casual time with people — the sort that helps grow professional relationships.

But here’s the thing. If you’re smart about it, it might actually be easier to build a robust professional network while working from home than it would be going into an office every day. You just have to be intentional about your actions.

More of the same

People who go to the same workplace five days a week definitely see more people in passing. But they tend to interact with the same people over and over again. They go to lunch or coffee with colleagues. They chat in the hallway after meetings. That’s great, but it can also lead to a feeling like any need to chat with people in the industry is met.

That is a problem, because as many people have belatedly discovered, if you need to find a new job, your immediate colleagues might not be that helpful. Some of them might have been laid off in the same purge that consumed your job. Even if they’re still at your organization, that’s where they’re going to know about positions — just as you are looking elsewhere. A robust professional network includes lots of people outside your organization.

In some ways, going into an office makes it more challenging to meet outside people — because many offices have strong norms that make it challenging to meet external people during the day. If you leave the office at 4 p.m. to grab coffee with someone else, people wonder where you’re going. If you skip lunch with your usual crew to meet someone else, people wonder what’s going on. It’s not that there would be any negative repercussions from these choices, but needing to explain yourself always puts a little damper on the impulse to do these things. And hey, it’s easier to have coffee with Joe down the hall than Bob who works a mile away at a different company. Joe is right there!

Different norms

When you are working from home, however, you escape a lot of these in-person norms. If you want to meet someone external to get coffee or lunch, no one really knows about it. You can have a conversation with anyone without someone in the cubicle next to you hearing it.

And since you’re not automatically socializing as much with your colleagues, you might feel more of a need to arrange to talk with people. And that’s a good thing — it can nudge you to reach out.

So, do just that. Make it a daily habit (the subject of a great book by Molly Beck called Reach Out). If you reach out to 240 people in a work year, maybe 100 will respond. Probably more, but let’s say 100. Maybe 10 of those will become solid connections through back and forth conversations, meeting for coffee and the like. That might not sound like much, but 10 people a year is 50 people over 5 years. That would be an impressively robust network of people cheering for you —and building that network would be quite doable, even if you’re working from home.

So even if you are working from home (perhaps especially if you are working from home), build in a few minutes today to think about who you’d like to get in touch with. Think about who else you could get in touch with too over the next few work days. None of this needs to take much time, but it’s probably a good use of time. While we all hope everything will go well in our careers, no one’s job is 100 percent certain. Using your work-from-home-flexibility to build a network of external people means that if things don’t work out, well, there are 50 people you could call who will help you take the next step. That will probably lead to something.