How Leaders Can Build Connection on Hybrid and Remote Teams
Tactical steps to building connection and belonging on your team
Hello. If you’re new here drop me a line to say hello. This week’s newsletter is all about how leaders and managers can build connectedness and trust to help their teams thrive
How Do We Connect?
One of the most challenging topics that has come up is navigating and leading teams when working remote or distributed in environments.
Among the many challenges that get cited, is the lack of connection that all people feel, both with their company as well as with one another. Oftentimes, this is cited as a reason for why employees need to be back in the office, but even those who are in the office can feel like they don’t feel connected or that they don’t belong.
The Connection Conundrum: We Like It But Don’t Have Enough of It
Relationships are the leading contributor to workplace well-being. But it’s also clear that as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us are feeling less connected. According to Pew Research, 65% of workers say they feel less connected to their co-workers.
Furthermore, BetterUp found that people who experience more connection at work, achieve their goals more often and enjoy greater well-being. They also report better business outcomes, including greater goal attainment (34%) greater well-being (36%) and more professional growth (92%) However, 61% of us, according to a Cigna study in 2018 (even before the pandemic) struggled with loneliness, and despite the many benefits of remote work, Glassdoor found many remote workers reported feeling isolated and disconnected from their organization.
BetterUp also found that this was especially true for remote workers, in their Connection report they found that remote workers had one fewer work friend than those working in the office, and as a result can feel up to 19% less of a sense of belonging than their in-person or hybrid teammates.
As we know from Gallup Research, the first-line manager is often the conduit for the everyday employee and their own engagement in their role at work. They are responsible for up to 70% of the variance in that engagement. In many ways, the manager not only is impacting an employee’s engagement in the role, but also, that employee’s relationship to the team and the rest of the organization.
This is why I think that managers in particular, have a role to play in both fostering connection to their employees, and also, through actions, rewards, and words, modeling to their employees the importance of connectedness and relationship building for each of their employees.
So if you are a manager, or if you are training, coaching, and empowering managers, how can you incorporate practical and intentional behaviors of connection so that you can improve employee engagement, and model behaviors you want your employees to exhibit? Here are a couple examples and suggestions that you can try.
#1) Build relationship building practices into the existing team workflow
To start, it’s important to differentiate between intensity and consistency. When it comes connection, it’s important to start with consistency. Building connection with your employees doesn’t need to be about big team bonding activities, company offsites or other grand gestures ( ex: intensity) but rather, the everyday rituals and practices that you can incorporate into the everyday work. Small habits practiced over time can lead to an increased sense of connection and belonging for your team. The best and easiest place to start is to identify opportunities inside of your existing team workflow where you can start connecting more intentionally. Think about all the opportunities and touch points you have with your employees and your team throughout a 2 week period, and identify a few moments or opportunities where you can find time to connect either 1:1 with an employee, or as a team.
Example of this: On a previous team I led, one practice we incorporated into our bi-weekly meeting as a team was spending the first 5 minutes on connection building. We did this by doing two things. First, we spent 2 minutes doing 1:1 check-ins, where people got a prompt, and 60 seconds to answer it with another teammate. Then we played a small game we called “hot seat.” One person would get on the “hot seat” and someone would have a bank of questions that they would ask them. The person on the hot seat had 90 seconds to answer as many questions as they could. The questions were all things that enabled us to get to know them personally. These two things were often cited in our team engagement survey as something that people appreciated.
2)Encourage your team to proactively and intentionally connect with their stakeholders
Building trusting relationships with stakeholders, peers, and leaders does not happen overnight, but rather, through time, and work. The challenge is that many of us wait until we have to work with those same people, and we’re both trying to build trust and connection and get things done at the same time. A better approach is to intentionally create time, and through repeated and deliberate practice, cultivate relationships with key people, so that when you do have to work with them you’ve already built connections that make it easier to work together.
As a manager, part of your job is to help your employees identify the tasks, projects, and work that they should be focused on in their role. To help them work both more productively and effectively, you can also encourage your team members to make sure they are making time to build relationships with the right people so that when it comes time to work with these people they are positioned for success.
Example of this: Prior to leading major projects or workstreams, a former manager of mine always told us to bake in a “Week 0” for any project. This week was for simply getting to take the time to know each one of our key stakeholders to better understand them as people. During these conversations, we’d get to know them, their challenges, their goals, and their preferred working styles. As a result, it made actually collaborating and getting buy-in from stakeholders a lot smoother along the way.
#3)Practice and encourage your team to proactively give feedback
According to Workhuman research, employees who feel appropriately recognized are more likely to be satisfied, productive and engaged, and less likely to leave. Giving regular, consistent, and actionable feedback to employees is a great way to help them gain clarity on how they are doing (a key thing employees want from their managers) as well as opportunities to improve. But in addition to that, it also shows them that you are paying attention to their work, and that you’re showing them you want them to succeed.
But there is an opportunity to go a step further, and that is to encourage and empower them to proactively provide feedback to their peers and colleagues. Since many employees actually want more feedback (caveat: helpful feedback) This seems meta, but let me explain. First, doing this helps them. If you can give specific examples to a peer of what they are doing well, then next time you work with them it will make it easier for you to work with them. Second, it also helps your employee build their connection, because the act of having them give feedback to someone else, is a form of connection itself. And then finally, a funny thing happens when you start giving other people feedback that is helpful more regularly: you start to get more feedback yourself. This is helpful as it helps an employee gain more insight into how they are doing, but again, it also helps them feel connected.
Example of this: Next time you see someone do something positive, give them the feedback but do it in a public manner so that others can see. In addition, you can also start a special feedback channel in your Slack or other messaging platform. In this thread, people can get the chance to publicly acknowledge when someone else on the team does something really positive. Each quarter, encourage your team to find one person that they worked with during the quarter who did something well, and encourage them to reach out to that individual to provide them this feedback.
#4) Make Building Relationships Part of Your Job
As a manager, your job is to get your team to deliver on an aligned result. This means working through, and with others to achieve this goal. In addition to this, you are also expected to partner across the organization, all while managing up with your leaders and executives. Your ability to effectively do this often correlates with how good the relationships you have with all of these people, and that takes work, effort, and intention.
While that is true, this takes a lot of work, effort, intention, and most notably, time, something I would guess you don’t have a lot of. But that is exactly why I think that making time for relationship building is important enough that it should inherently be a part of your job.
As a manager, you can’t do everything, so you need to find the things that are of highest value and most critical. Since having positive relationships can positively impact the results you drive, it’s important to invest the time in actions and activities that build relationships so that you can ultimately achieve those results.
But I know it can be hard to do, especially in our complex and dynamically changing world of work.
In our interview on The Edge of Work, Dr. Gabriella Rosen Kellerman of BetterUp said to me:
“The barriers to connection presented by the modern way of work are significant and will become even more so in the decades to come. We will continue to feel that we have no time for each other. We will continue to feel physically distant because we are. And will will continue to to feel like we belong, because of the real differences that divide us”
But amidst all that you have to do, how can you find time to invest in intentionally building relationships? Dr. Kellerman suggested this concept of “rapid rapport,” or small and consistent actions of empathy and compassion that build trust and connection over time. She gave a couple examples of how to do this, and cited this idea of time affluence as a way to make time to focus on building relationships.
In the research paper titled. “Giving Time Gives You Time,” a trio of professors from Wharton, Yale and Harvard wanted to find out how to help busy people discover how to find time. They designed an experiment to test four strategies:
Giving people time back in their day that had previously been committed to a task
Asking people to spend that same amount of time on a task helping others
Asking people to waste the time
Asking people to spend that time on themselves
Their research found that when we help others, for even just 15 or 30 minutes, we experience that as time added to our day, rather than lost. Helping ourselves, by comparison, does nothing.
We can use this concept of rapid rapport with the employees on our team, the stakeholders we have to work with, and the leaders we have to manage up to, so that we can produce better results.
Example of this: In her article on rapid rapport, Dr. Kellerman suggested two sentences and scripts you can use with your colleagues when working alongside them that can help strengthen that rapid rapport:
For a Direct Report: Great job today. I know it’s been tough this past week. I see how hard you are working and I’m proud to be working alongside you.
For a Stakeholder or peer: I really admire how you are rolling with the punches. I want you to know you’re not in it alone. I’m here, too, and we’ll figure it out together.
#5) Publicly Acknowledge and Share How You Are Connecting with Others
As a manager, your actions scale. The actions you take, the behaviors you model, and the words you say are things that your team takes cues from as they go about their work. If you want to improve the connection on your team or how your team connects, another way to do this, is to call attention to what you are doing, as well as to acknowledge and reward others who are also doing it. This means sharing the approaches that you yourself are using to connect with your other peers, colleagues and leaders, as well as highlighting and publicly encouraging your team members when you see them doing the same thing.
Like many of these other recommendations, these don’t have to be grand gestures or big things, but rather small moments and instances where you can, through your actions and words, share how much you value connectedness on your team. This does two things. First, it makes it clear to your employees the importance of connection. Second, it encourages them through practical ways, how they can go about connecting with others that can help themselves.
Example of this: During the next team meeting, you can share with others the specific actions you are taking to improve your own connectedness to other people, and then encourage other team members to share what they are doing as well. Doing this can spur ideas for other people for what they might be able to try.
Conclusion
Drawing again on my conversation with Dr. Kellerman, she said in our interview something that inspired me to write this piece:
“We need each other, we need to matter to each other. We need each other to feel well, to be well to live well. We need each other to succeed personally and professionally. And our organizations rely on social behaviors to drive productivity, innovation and customer success. “
Employees feeling connected, regardless of whether they are hybrid, remote or in-person, is essential to business success. And that starts with you as a manager modeling that for your employees.
Teams don’t outperform their leaders, so if you want to improve the connection you have with your employees and the overall sense of connection and belonging on your team, it starts with the actions you take, the words you say, and the behaviors that you reward.
If you’re looking for some help for your learning and development, leadership development or professional development for this year, I’d love to work with you: Here is how I might be able to assist:
Team Trainings & Professional Development: Happy to facilitate training or professional development opportunity for your team & organization - common topics include: influence without authority, navigating change, hybrid working, and others.
Consulting & Advisory Work - Are you looking to improve the ways of working of your team or organization or looking for guidance on remote/hybrid work? Let’s chat about how we can work together
Leadership & Learning Programs: Formal training and leadership development in your company, such as new manager or new leader training, or skill-based programs.
Feel free to contact me directly for more details!
Have a great week!
Al