How Leaders Can Build Connection in the Hybrid Workplace

The global pandemic has brought to light the importance of a lot of things – public health, clear communication, cooperation between teams and the reliance of technology. But one thing it has made clear is the importance of relationships and connection in the workplace, especially when it comes to own well-being and engagement as employees, as well as for business results.

The pandemic highlighted just how important employee well- being is – both for individuals and the bottom line. Research from the employee engagement software company Work human suggests workers are feeling more anxious (37%), isolated (31%), overwhelmed (28%), and less motivated (24%). (Work Human)What’s behind this? 59% of those surveyed cited “less human connection” as the culprit.

As I think about the hybrid workplace, one of the things that I think a lot about is the importance of having strong relationships and human connection with peers and colleagues even when we aren’t physically together. We traditionally associate feelings of connection and engagement with being physically present (rightfully or wrongfully) and while technology has been a huge help for many companies over the past 18 months, even technology has its limitations when trying to foster and cultivate relationships between people who work together in the same company.

This also really shows up when it comes to certain types of relationship building moments that are critical to the success of talent – such as onboarding a new employee. Ask any employee who onboarded into a new role or company during the latter half of 2020 what that experience was like and how easy and seamless it was to build relationships and see what they say. (I’m assuming it wasn’t easy)

As as a self-identified person, I have always focused on building relationships and have seen first hand the benefits of fostering better connections with other people, not just for driving results, but for general life and workplace satisfaction and overall connection and purpose in the work I do. Over the years, I’ve developed a few frames for how I think about how to approach building relationships that increase your ability to do your job while bringing you improved overall satisfaction, even in a hybrid world.

4 Ways Leaders Can Build Connection With Their Employees

1)Encourage Relationship building is not separate from the job, it is part of the job

Building relationships and fostering genuine connections isn’t separate from your work, but part of your work – Oftentimes, we get told that networking is important as is building relationships and we need to make time to do this. This is well intentioned advice but I think we need to reposition this – Taking the time to build relationships isn’t something we need to do outside of our core job, it is our core job. As an employee, your job is to do your work by coming up with solutions to problems that drive outcomes for customers. While some of these problems are fairly straight forward, many are not and require creativity, ideation and innovation. Even for the smartest of people, you probably will never have all of the answers on your own. The best way to come up with them is to collide and interact and engage with other people. Being connected with others and having good relationships with your peers and colleagues is a great way to ensure this innovation happens, but it doesn’t just happen without an investment. That is why I am going to suggest that a portion of your day job and the tasks you do each day should directly tie to fostering better relationships with your teammates, colleagues or even others in your industry

2)Acknowledging both Strong and Weak Ties

If you’ve ever taken a course or class on networking or organizational dynamics, you may have heard of the concept of weak ties. As the sociologist Mark Granovetter argued in 1973, functioning societies are underpinned not only by “strong ties” (close relationships), but also by “weak ties” (casual acquaintances). Whereas strong ties tend to form dense, overlapping networks – our close friends are often close friends with one another – weak ties connect us to a larger and more diverse group of people.

By bridging different social circles, weak ties are more likely to connect us with new ideas and perspectives, challenging our ideas and fostering innovation. While technology and apps help us stay connected with existing ties, they do not always help us find or encourage us to connect with new people outside of or existing social circles.

Microsoft Teams has done some interesting research during COVID-19 that has shown that based on the people that use teams, there has been an increase in our connections and relationships with strong ties but a decrease in interactions with people we’d normally consider weak ties. Intuitively we can kind of see how this plays out: in the old world, you may run into that distant co-worker in the cafeteria and agree to find time to catch up just to find out they know someone who can help you with a project. Unfortunately, those types of collisions and interactions go away during covid-19 when everything is virtual. On the flipside, as everyone moved to ore digital collaborations, we spent the most time communicating with the folks we talked to or needed most – ideally the people on our team (more likely to be strong ties)

The upshot of all of this is that we need to be more thoughtful and intentional about facilitating connections and interactions.

If we think about this for a second – if we spend time with another colleague or friend in a dialogue in a virtual zoom, is usually goes something like this:

We share what’s going on and what we are up too
We exchange insights and ideas
We exchange best practices, examples, or antidotes that might be relevant
We get names of potential individuals to connect with or reach out to for additional ideas

This is a pretty standard interaction, but in a hybrid world where we are more likely to engage with people who are close to us, we are losing out on a whole slew of new and diverse ideas, insights, best practices, or individuals that could potentially lead to better solutions or ideas for problems that we are solving.

The cure for this is to be intentional and proactive about engaging with folks who we don’t always get the chance to see or connect with on a regular basis (weak ties.)

So how do you get around this and how do you find intentional (but meaningful) ways to foster weak ties? One of the most effective ways is bringing people into conversation about ideas they may not normally be talking about. Rather than trying to force conversations as part of a random coffee chat, you create an event where there’s a common goal or purpose, where people can discuss something that may be totally unrelated to work, like art. You’re allowing people to come together in ways where they can show different ways of thinking and start to connect with one another, but the point is very much around innovation and creativity—it’s not just trying to foster social interaction for its own sake.

3)Look for ways to strengthen trust on your team

Trust is the bedrock of any relationship – if you happen to have a significant other or a spouse you know that trust is the bedrock of the relationship. This is as true for work relationships as it is for our personal ones. In a hybrid world, trust can sometimes be hard to build because we cannot be face to face. But if you want strong relationships on your team, think about the ways you can go about facilitating trust for your team members so you can create trust on your team and be seen as a trustworthy colleague.

So what kind of trust is there and how should you build it? According to BetterUp, there are two kinds of trust.

Practical trust – This is the more traditional type of trust, and the one that usually first comes to mind when thinking about how to trust someone. You earn this kind of trust by being a hard-working employee. You show up on time. You get your work done and meet deadlines. Earning this kind of trust will get you the reputation of being someone who’s reliable and competent. When you say you’ll do something, you actually do it.

The second kind of trust is emotional trust – You create emotional trust by going above and beyond what’s expected of you, and creating meaningful bonds with your team. It requires a level of emotional intelligence that shows others that you are thoughtful, genuine and caring. emotional trust is trusting behavior motivated primarily by strong positive affect for the object of trust. Emotional trust is defined as emotional security, or feeling secure, or comfortable by Xiao & Benbasat (2003)

How to build trust and strengthen the relationships between you and your peers

Show people that you care – Letting people know you are thinking about them and that you genuinely care for their well-being lets them know that you care for them
Be Helpful – Going out of your way to offer a hand or to help them out builds trust and confidence that they can rely on you
Honor commitments – Honoring what you say you will do makes you reliable and depndenable

Intuitively, I think it makes sense for all of us to feel like there is trust there before we can trust others. I’m going to encourage people to think about if they can either:

Foster trust so others feel like there is a sense of trust
Assume trust first versus demanding it from others

Doing so will in turn create a sense of trust, and that will allow the team to foster and thrive. Note: this is not an easy thing to do, and certainly, it may be much easier for certain people and populations of the workforce to do it, but if you are in a position of privilege, I think this is an action you can take to help foster trust on your team.

4)Focus on well-being and engagement

In their book Work Better Together, my former colleagues Anh Phillips and Jennifer Fisher explore the impact that relationships have on our well-being and overall engagement in the work that we do. In a recent podcast interview, they said:

The idea is that we all need that deep human connection, especially in the workplace, where we spend a third to half of our waking hours in any given week. It’s a great opportunity to have real connections.

Now that we know the positive benefits of having good relationships with our coworkers and peers, we can use this as a means to ensure we invest in these relationships in our day jobs since we know that it will improve our overall engagement and health and wellness.

Research from Gallup suggests that employees who have a close friend at work are seven times more likely to be engaged in their job, and employees who are satisfied with the connections they have in the workplace are more likely to be engaged and attached to the organization.

Furthermore, Relationships are the leading contributor to workplace well-being. Relationships ranked the highest contributing aspect of well-being (7.85 out of 10), followed by Meaning (7.69), Accomplishments (7.66), Engagement (7.43), and Positive Emotions (7.19 out of 10).

Be spending time fostering connection with others, we can improve our own wellness.*

Conclusion

Brene Brown has one of my favorite quotes about human beings and our need to connect and relate to one another. In The Gifts of Imperfection, she writes:

“Of this, I am actually certain. After collecting thousands of stories, I’m willing to call this a fact: A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all women, men, and children. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.”

One of the benefits of technology and machines is that they can go for a long time without needing a tune up. Unfortunately, we as human beings are not built in the same way. But even with that, every app eventually needs a software upgrade or every machine needs a tune-up.

Think of investing time and energy into building relationships as the software upgrade or tune-up you need to fuel your own engagement, performance and well-being at work. And whether the investments in time you are making are intended to benefit others or yourself, having the confidence to know that allowing yourself to lean into your human skills and needs and allowing others to do the same can help create a workplace culture where humans can thrive.

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