Work Reconnected

Mischief plus teaching is even better than teaching. In my continuing quest to create mischief plus/minus to improve people’s lives, I assigned recent workshop participants the following task:

-        Text someone you wish you spent more time with.

In case they needed it, I gave them this script:

”This guy at a conference is making us send texts to people we wish we spent more time with. Hope you’re well.”

The results exceeded my expectations:

-        One woman’s text led to plans on five different dates.

-        Another woman is joining a friend on vacation.

-        A guy who texted his college roommate received the response, “New phone. Who dis?”

Success is measured in a variety of ways.

I created this activity to demonstrate the simplicity of creating connection. We face a lot of inertia around creating connection. This inertia can be social, logistical, or emotional. The first step toward overcoming this inertia and having more connection is often simple: a quick text, deciding to show up, or actually meaning it when you say, “How are you?”

Workshops, like the ones I recently conducted, should also be important steps toward connection.  I tell my audience, in this instance state government leaders, that there is the stated curriculum of what I am teaching (in this case how to thrive as a leader) and the unstated curriculum of what I also hope to accomplish. That unstated curriculum is that I want them to network with their peers and build a more engaged organizational culture that supports everyone’s success. I specifically state this at the start of my sessions so that everyone recognizes that they are essential to our success. I’m a pretty good teacher, and I’m even more effective when the learners are teaching, too. And, if they connect with each other, those relationships will benefit them personally and professionally long after I have left.

The pandemic and the rise of virtual work have made this unstated curriculum more crucial. Coworkers have less time and fewer opportunities to interact informally. As we disperse work across multiple locations including our homes and other countries, we lose the water cooler chit-chat and the serendipitous lunch conversation. The data shows this: in-person workers feel more support from their peers while virtual workers are more satisfied with family life. We need to recognize the pros and cons of this tradeoff of modern work.

Meanwhile, people have fewer friends. Virtualization of work will likely make the friendship recession worse. The data on how changes in work impact relationships is limited, but data on romantic relationships shed some light on the area.  As this spiffy chart (or the chart in this article) shows, longitudinal data from Stanford demonstrate that the number of couples who meet at work has fallen by more than half. This finding is not necessarily a bad thing—we don’t want our workplaces to be charged with romance—but it is also a correlation of how workplaces may not be creating connection in the same kind of ways.

Workplaces should invest more in cultivating connection. About 30% of job satisfaction is explained by the friendships (or lack of friendships) at work. Want to love your job? Make a friend at work.

This data is even more important if you are a boss. Friendships are the most important factor for whether someone stays in a job. I hear this constantly from my team: I stay here because of the people I work with.

I would love to see companies take bold steps toward cultivating friendships in our modern workplaces. Instead of investing in office space, companies should invest in activities to bring people together. Who needs a glass-paneled suite when you can take the whole office on a cruise? Less exuberantly, sharing meals as a team should be seen as an essential professional development and retention expense. Near to my heart, training events should be designed to have coworkers interact and collaborate to build relationships. The content might be less important than the process.

I also have tried other tactics for building connection with my colleagues: making sure we meet once a year to check in, having regular face-to-face venues to which everyone is invited, and celebrating personal as well as professional accomplishments. I am not sure which of these approaches, if any, are most important, but I do know that the modern workplace is pulling us further and further apart, and we need to focus on building connection.

I think of a continuum of connection that increases from awareness to familiarity to interdependence to trust. As we build from basic awareness to an understanding of someone’s abilities (familiarity) to interdependence that helps everyone, we are really building toward trust or the idea of believing in each other. Trust is what we should strive to build, and trust is also the potential in a relationship that may be lying fallow.

When I ask people to text someone who they want to spend more time with, I am activating that trust. That connection may be the most vibrant aspect of our lives, yet we so often leave it unfulfilled in life and at work. If we don’t build those connections, when we ask for help, someone might really mean it when they answer, “Who dis?”