Jacob Ma wasn’t going to let the fact that his new job kept him at home all day stop him from making new friends.

As soon as he joined the software company Qualtrics as a consultant in January, the former college resident adviser and inveterate social organizer started brainstorming ways to hang out with his new colleagues. He first put together virtual social events, like online happy hours and scavenger hunts, and, starting in late March, added in-person meetups at safe outdoor venues in the Seattle metro area.

“It’s really hard to make friends over Zoom, and it’s definitely easier for me to meet someone in real life and see whether we might want to hang out again outside of work,” says Mr. Ma, 27 years old. Today, he has a couple of colleagues he hangs out with regularly on the weekends and continues to organize events roughly once a month.

Jacob Ma, wearing a purple shirt, has been organizing social events for his Seattle-area team at the software company Qualtrics since joining in January.

Jacob Ma, wearing a purple shirt, has been organizing social events for his Seattle-area team at the software company Qualtrics since joining in January.

Photo: Jacob Ma

“Jacob is like a party-planning committee of one,” says his co-worker Britney Shalloway, 29, who moved to Seattle in June and has appreciated these events as a way to get to know her colleagues in a new city.

Starting a remote job can be hard, but many people have found new ways to forge work friendships during the pandemic. There’s no longer a proverbial water cooler to generate casual encounters, and some younger workers have never had a physical office at all. But they’ve overcome the awkwardness of the digital chat box to initiate meaningful, if often distanced, friendships. Some online work friends have even found success taking their hangouts offline once the vaccine rollout made socializing and travel easier.

Making friends at work was getting harder even before the pandemic. In 1985, some 27% of Americans had at least one “confidant” at work, but by 2004 only 16% did, according to the General Social Survey, a long-running survey of about 1,500 U.S. adults conducted by the independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago

In 2017, more than half of people had five or fewer friends at work, according to a survey of more than 2,000 managers and employees in 10 countries by Virgin Pulse, a wellness technology firm, and the HR advisory firm Future Workplace.

That’s unfortunate, says Jennifer Deal, a senior research scientist at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. “What’s clear from two decades of studying young people and new workers in the workforce is that humans need to be around other humans in order to thrive,” she says.

Emily Chang, wearing gray, says she has made a special effort to meet up with her colleagues at Veeva despite having a fully remote job.

Emily Chang, wearing gray, says she has made a special effort to meet up with her colleagues at Veeva despite having a fully remote job.

Photo: Veeva

Some companies with continuing remote-work setups have made socializing an explicit part of onboarding new employees. Veeva, a cloud-computing company based in Pleasanton, Calif., has no mandatory return-to-office plan for its roughly 5,000 employees. Emily Chang, 23, started there last August as a fully remote associate consultant based in Lexington Park, Md., shortly after graduating from Georgia Tech.

“I was onboarded with a cohort of about 20 new employees, so I bonded with them from the get-go,” she says. In the fall and winter, she made efforts to meet up with three co-workers she had connected with online, while passing through Asheville, N.C., and Philadelphia, where they lived.

“I graduated into the pandemic world, so it didn’t feel weird to set up stuff like that,” she says. “We know you have to be intentional about communication.”

Her work friendships kicked up a notch when her workplace added organized group hangouts to her one-on-one efforts. In July, she drove 90 minutes each way to attend a Washington Nationals baseball game with nearly 20 of her co-workers in the D.C. metro area. She brought her boyfriend. Other colleagues brought partners and children, which she said helped them talk about things outside work.

Monica Englelbrecht met many of her colleagues for the first time at a company off-site in Slovenia.

Monica Englelbrecht met many of her colleagues for the first time at a company off-site in Slovenia.

Photo: Monica Engelbrecht

The fact that the activity was outdoors helped boost attendance, Ms. Chang says. Because of people’s varying comfort levels with social distancing, workers have had to think through the logistics of hanging out in-person. Mr. Ma, in Seattle, says he only transitioned from virtual to in-person hangouts after people started getting vaccinated.

For companies that are more comfortable with extended in-person socializing, a dedicated off-site can help cement many of the virtual friendships that arose between employees during the pandemic. Monica Engelbrecht, 25, joined Celtra, a digital-advertising software company, in November, working remotely from her parents’ house in Connecticut. She virtually befriended a number of colleagues in Slovenia, where the company’s founders hail from, through online chats and silly Slack channels like one dedicated to the pop star Harry Styles. She finally got to meet her virtual work friends at a weeklong off-site in July that started in the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana, and went up into the Julian Alps.

Nearly two-thirds of the company’s roughly 220 employees gathered for what she calls a “magical experience” after months of remote work. She even made a new friend, a Slovenian counterpart on the marketing team, whom she got to know through long talks over dinner.

Remote-work friendships typically take more effort and resources—whether it’s thanks to a dedicated planner like Mr. Ma, or Ms. Engelbrecht’s all-expenses-paid trip—than workplace friendships that arise from regular in-person contact.

“I worry about those people who are not doing all of this,” USC’s Dr. Deal says. “Not everybody is so forceful, self-assured and extroverted as to say, ‘I’m going into this new job: Who can I set up coffee chats with?’…My guess is, that’s a large percentage of the workforce.”

Over time, she says, divergence between those who master this new kind of high-effort socializing and those who don’t may negatively affect the second group’s career progression. “It’s important that organizations that continue to have remote workers actively facilitate [socializing] for people who may have less gumption,” she says.

Meanwhile, some have found the new ways to make work friends to be a silver lining to a strange year. Anderson Campbell, 43, and Wade Zarosinski, 36, became friends last summer, after Mr. Campbell started a remote role at ZoomInfo, a database software company based in Vancouver, Wash. They initially connected over a shared sense of humor evident in large Zoom meetings, which turned into private Slack chats, then phone calls and one-on-one video calls, and an endless stream of text messages that continues to this day.

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Not only did they do the same kind of customer-training work at their company, but they shared a willingness to talk about their personal history and feelings that quickly bonded them.

“He’s now one of my go-to people to process life with,” says Mr. Campbell, who lives in Beaverton, Ore.; Mr. Zarosinski lives in Vancouver. “I was surprised I could form such a strong friendship completely digitally, because I’ve never done anything like that before.”

Write to Krithika Varagur at krithika.varagur@wsj.com