Road Warriors lead the pack in nurturing workplace connections from anywhere

The degree to which employees have shifted back to the office varies from company to company, but new research has found ‘Road Warriors’ – who are more likely to be physically displaced from their teams – are adept at using technology to develop and foster connections from anywhere.

The research – conducted by productivity platform Slack and market research firm YouGov – found over a fifth (21%) of Australian respondents to the survey of 15,492 desk workers identified as ‘The Road Warrior’ persona. This group of largely extroverted employees thrive in peripatetic roles where they leverage collaborative technology to connect and stay engaged with their co-workers. 

Aiming to better understand the diversity of psychological traits in contemporary workplaces, the research identified five distinct workplace personas, with Road Warriors working alongside ‘Detectives’, ‘Networkers’, ‘Problem Solvers’, and ‘Expressionists’ that run the gamut of individual working styles and information processing preferences.

For the Road Warriors identified in the research, 76% said they value the ability to be flexible and 55% said the ability to work wherever they want in a way that fits their schedule was a priority for them. 

Road Warriors were seen by peers as being excellent at creating connections with colleagues virtually – a skill that could well suit a group of people who, recent University of South Australia (UniSA) research has shown, love remote work so much that they would sacrifice a percentage of their salary for the right to do so. The UniSA study found one in five respondents would sacrifice up to $24,000 annually for the privilege, however it also uncovered workers’ concerns about the “negative impacts on their relationship with their colleagues, supervisors and the firm as a whole.”

Technology is increasingly emerging as a way of bridging this gap for Road Warriors identified in the Slack research, who worked remotely either due to preference or the nature of their job.

Just because they are isolated from the office doesn’t mean they are isolated from their colleagues, however: such personas are experts at “success in isolation,” Slack APAC technology evangelist Derek Laney told iTnews.

For such workers “it’s not about disconnecting from the team,” Laney explained.

“They’re all about maintaining relationships from wherever they are – and regardless of whether they see people in person or not, they’ve found ways to hack it so they can maintain the relationship, but get as much productivity as possible in both their professional and personal lives.”

Workers matching the Road Warrior persona are disproportionately women and underrepresented groups that have, Laney said, “traditionally carried the burden of needing to be other things outside of their working life”.

Working together, growing together

As well as valuing the flexibility that remote work provides, Road Warriors tend to be quite comfortable embracing collaboration platforms and other modern workplace tools, Laney said, noting that once heavily messaging based platforms are now facilitating more spontaneous, water cooler-like interactions through features like Slack huddles.

By both mirroring and facilitating interpersonal relationships within teams, no matter where their members are located, such tools can keep Road Warriors in the loop – overcoming the differences between personas and ensuring that teams benefit from a variety of personality types.

“Whether you’ve got five employees or 5,000, everyone can relate to the fact that the workplace is an ecosystem of different personalities,” Laney explained.

“And part of the strength of teams is the fact that you bring people, who aren’t the same, together – and when you do things together, you get more interesting things done than you would do on your own.”

All personality types will thrive based on different combinations of business processes and technological tools – such as Slack collaboration features like huddles, canvas, clips and Slack Connect complementing information services like Slack Atlas, and business process tools like Workflow Builder alongside over 2,600 app integrations.

When it comes to engaging Road Warriors with competing obligations and priorities, however, the benefits of collaboration platforms are broader than immediate connectivity. By freeing remote workers from concerns that their distance will exclude them from the company’s office culture, those workers will be happier and more productive during the time they do have to give.

That’s a powerful promise in a working world where HR leaders are struggling to adapt their business culture to hybrid work and Australian employees’ perceptions of business culture are plumbing all-time lows.

But for managers wanting to make the most of their teams, engaging all kinds of personas is crucial to avoiding heterogeneity and promoting diversity.

“Part of that is understanding what the new style of work is, and how they can understand each other a little bit better,” Laney explained, noting that the use of personas to group employees is about how managers can learn to appreciate the differences within their teams.

“It’s more to say ‘my way of doing things may not be the only way of doing things’,” he said. “’And if I can understand that, there are potentially multiple ways to get work done – and ways to get more out of my team.’”

To learn more about how Slack keeps Road Warriors connected with the office, click here.