Anne Krog Iversen is the Co-founder, Chief DNA & Culture Officer at TimeXtender.
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The importance of making good connections at work, and in life in general, cannot be overstated.
In fact, in the business world, many organizations are seeing the impact of loneliness caused by the pandemic and are considering new ways to help their employees compensate for isolation. As businesses try to determine the best approach to managing their company in a new business environment, these plans often include working remotely.
Constance Noonan Hadley analyzes connection building in a June 2021 article in Harvard Business Review, taking a closer look at how other companies have instituted workshops, group activities, new benefits, stronger employee recognition and rewards for interacting at work. The belief is that these initiatives help people interact with others to build a greater sense of connectivity, belonging and support.
The Potential Project published an article titled, “Cultivating Your Mental Well-Being at Work,” accompanied by an infographic that provides value in helping us understand connections at work. It also includes a reference to the Potential Project’s “The Mind at Work” study that laid out some of the essential benefits that employees can experience with more social connections. This resourceful information explains how we have a strong desire and need to connect with others, as experiencing loneliness can have a dramatic impact on our mental well-being. If loneliness is rooted deeply, it can even lead to job burnout.
By building strong connections at work, we can enhance our overall happiness and health. Doing so can improve our work performance as connected people are more engaged, more resilient and tend to miss less time at work. These factors can lead to greater job performance, less stress, better focus and even more energy.
Our company, TimeXtender, is now a fully distributed organization where everyone works remotely, so offering programs to engage and connect with others is a priority for our employees and work culture. We’ve worked diligently to provide programs for our company so that the Xpeople (what we call ourselves at TimeXtender) can build connections with their colleagues.
With that, here are a few ideas we have implemented to build stronger connections during the workday that you can use in your organization.
1. Cultivate team interactions. Find new ways for your team to interact in and outside their departments. Encourage coffee talks with colleagues from other divisions and outside respective team circles. Our work culture structure of organizational purpose circles, or OPCs, for instance, allows us all to connect in circle purpose talks as well as individual purpose talks.
2. Encourage weekly connection gatherings at work. Find a common time for people to convene and connect every week. For example, we offer breakfasts along with recharge sessions where we take shared responsibilities for our health and well-being.
3. Set up employee training sessions at work. Discover what programs could be helpful in building stronger relations amongst your teams. Here are a few places to start that we've found success: a team reading of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, corporate mindfulness activities to guide employees to relaxation and a minute of silence to commence all business meetings by landing and recharging from previous activities to the new meeting.
4. Promote regular social gatherings at work. Listen to what your employees want and see in what ways you can deliver by offering outlets for engagement and interaction. For instance, we implemented two new programs that were suggested by the Xpeople. The first is “Barstools,” where Xpeople can informally socialize online as you would in a hotel bar, and the second is “Café Karmas,” where the Xpeople can socialize with work colleagues on various personal topics such as books, recipes or current events. In addition, we find that participants also talk about corporate values and what they mean to each of them individually.
5. Consider developing your corporate programs. Create a corporate-wide annual inspirational event that includes games, team events, discussion and stories. Call on outside expertise, too. For instance, we have a corporate program where we sponsor an outside business leader to host a webinar on a topic that they’re known for, which allows for questions and answers with the presenter.
Establishing connections is not hard to do—we just have to step back and think about how to proceed. Start by being aware and attending social events at work or become proactive in arranging new social engagements such as coffee meetings, online book clubs, recharge classes and other events.
Having connections at work can really help us improve our overall success and general well-being. It’s simply a question of awareness and being conscious about the meaning and importance of spending time building these connections and maintaining relations. Doing so might be more important than ever before now that many of us are working from home and don’t see people as much as we have in the past. Given this, business leaders should consider connection building as a proactive and priority initiative for maintaining and enhancing our work cultures.
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