Phil Burgess is Chief People Officer at C Space, a customer agency on a mission to make business more human.
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It’s a paradox of the times that although we’ve seen inside more of our colleagues’ homes than ever before and met significantly more of their family members and pets, it’s proving increasingly challenging for people to form strong and meaningful relationships with colleagues at work. With nearly 42% of the U.S. population working remotely, gone are the serendipitous water cooler conversations, the ability to spin round on your chair to gossip with a colleague or the chance to escape the office for lunch with a friend. This trend is set to continue. According to the same study, 36.2 million Americans will be working remotely by 2025, an 87% increase from pre-pandemic levels. Against this backdrop, it’s critical that organizational leaders think intentionally about how they can support and encourage their people to build relationships at work.
At C Space, a customer agency on a mission to make business more human, we’re firm believers that relationships equal results. It’s a principle we’ve built into client projects for 20 years, connecting brands with their customers to cocreate solutions to business challenges. To unlock meaningful human insights, you need to get people talking about their hopes and dreams, fears and frustrations. It’s hard to do that without first building a relationship. Now, more than ever, we’re doubling down on this principle to strengthen relationships across our own organization. We're definitely not getting everything right, but we're finding that focusing on the following three areas can make a meaningful difference.
1. Make space and make sure people know why it matters.
As we approached the end of an incredibly intense year, people were understandably exhausted. We heard from people across our business — and I saw it in my own behavior at times — that people just wanted to get their work done and get off video calls. People weren’t taking the time to connect on a human level.
Recognizing this sense of disconnection on our own team, someone suggested we take a leaf out of former Surgeon General of the United States Vivek Murthy’s book. While acting Surgeon General, Murthy developed an exercise called "Inside Scoop," where team members were asked to share something about themselves through pictures for a few minutes during meetings to foster personal connections. We started doing this — one photo each, for just 30 seconds. We were really clear about what we were doing and why it mattered. Sometimes we simply start the meeting with a question: What are you most proud of from last week? What are you struggling with right now? It doesn’t serve as an energizer or icebreaker but as an intentional stimulus to build a connection between us. Everyone speaks, and we have the opportunity to learn about moments that matter in each other’s lives.
2. Design relationship-building into existing company rituals.
Building relationships doesn’t always have to take more time. Knowing that the last thing people want right now is something else to do, we’ve been exploring ways to operationalize relationship-building by building it into existing rituals. We’ve been experimenting with our all-staff meeting when 300 people come together for an hour once a week. Previously more of a broadcast session, the chat function is now left on throughout the meeting. Now during these sessions, the chat is buzzing with banter and congratulatory messages, providing a chance to ask questions of presenters and give immediate positive feedback. Several times, our U.K. team has repurposed their staff meeting, using video breakout rooms to split everyone into random small groups and providing them with thought-starter questions to get the conversation going, a way to recreate the randomness of bumping into someone at the water cooler. It’s not quite the same, but it reminds people of the importance of social connection and strengthens ties between people who don’t get to spend much time together.
3. Encourage empathy.
Relationships require you to understand where others are coming from. One of the things we’ve learned is that although we are all currently working remotely and going through the same pandemic, every single person is experiencing it differently. At times, relationships have become strained when we’ve lost sight of the uniqueness of individual experience, generalizing about the experience of parents or organizational leaders or people living alone. Like most organizations, we have a set of corporate values and we’ve doubled down on encouraging and celebrating those values, which foster relationship building and encourage empathy.
Two of these values have become particularly relevant: "open up and listen" and "show the love." The first encourages everyone to work hard to understand different points of view. The second reminds us to be kind to others and remember to take care of ourselves, too. We’ve reminded people that while we’re all able to see into one another’s homes through our video screens, we don’t always know everything that’s going on in people’s lives. We may not be aware of the grief they may be experiencing because of Covid, anxiety triggered by politics or frustrations caused by schooling their children at home. All of this might impact how they show up at work. It’s easier to have empathy for someone when you know what’s going on in their life. It takes an extra intentional moment of patience or curiosity when you’re not as close to what’s going on.
Relationships are messy. They require nurturing, thought and dedication to establish or strengthen them or rebuild them when they’ve broken down. There are no silver bullets for leaders navigating tough times, but those who invest intentionally in helping their people build relationships will reap the rewards of creating more successful, more sustainable and more human organizations for the people who work in them.
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