Creating connection, belonging and engagement virtually
You’ve realised that you will be working virtually for some time to come.
Until now, you may have muddled along, thinking it will be over soon. But it’s not.
So creating connection, belonging and engagement virtually are vital.
Why? Because that is what will give you productivity. People first, productivity will follow. If you want to know the psychological underpinnings behind this, you may wish to read up about attachment theory.
What have you learned so far about connection, belonging and engagement of your team members virtually? And what else can you start?
Building a sense of belonging involves:
- Eliminating “outsiderness” – everyone needs to feel that they are included
- Ensuring that everyone includes everyone else and allows others’ voices to be heard
- Modelling and encouraging care for each other
- Stopping -isms in their track (racism, sexism, ageism etc). Do not allow it to flourish behind people’s backs
Building connection involves:
- Seeing each other as humans first
- Asking questions that elicit stories for greater connection. We’ve been able to see into each others’ lives through Zoom and MSTeams etc, so let’s keep that up
- Listening! Don’t underestimate the power of silence
- Smiling (that one’s easy!!)
- Differences of opinion, dialogue, debate
- Creating screen-free time for all, so that you can recharge
“Having strong connections at work is one of the greatest predictors of happiness, success, and health, which makes it an outstanding investment of time and resources,” says Shawn Achor, a Harvard researcher.
Building engagement involves:
- Asking what motivates them and adapting the way you work with them to meet those needs in small or large ways. One size does not fit all
- Being clear about new measures of success
- Helping people to prioritise to meet the new measures of success
- Appreciating people for progress (any progress is good progress)
- Appreciating who they are being, not just what they are achieving
None of these takes much time, so you don’t have the excuse that you have to wait until you have time for a one-hour check-in. These are all things that you can do during the course of day-to-day virtual conversations. I don’t want to hear anything about the impossibility of this due to our virtual work patterns either. I’ve been working virtually for 15+ years and have never met some of the people I worked with, yet we still fostered belonging, connection and engagement. In fact, one of the teams I belonged to knocked the socks off other virtual teams and we believe it is because of these things, not because we were working ridiculously long hours.
Transition conversations
We’ve been focusing on connecting with team members in a more human way – stretching ourselves beyond our normal conversations about projects, tasks and productivity.
We want people to have an emotional connection to the company they work for. A connection with both their mind and their heart. If we can achieve that, we will entice talent to join and to stay, because they are in a place they love working and are doing work they love to do. And to do so, we need to look at their experience through their eyes, not an HR view, and offer them support where they are, not where we think they are.
So we are moving away from an HR life cycle view of the working world, towards an employee experience view of the workplace. How can we ensure that the employee has the experience that will engage them in what they love doing, what they are good at and what the organisation needs to achieve? That should be the question that is top of our mind. Employee Engagement 3.0 if you like.
Let’s use this opportunity to revisit conversations at transition points in a person’s career. Right now, redundancy is perhaps the most prevalent transition. Feel free to dip into whichever of these conversations feels relevant for you and your team currently.
- The employee experience: joining the workforce
- The employee experience: re-joining the workforce
- Coaching the Employee Experience: Change in Role
- The Employee Experience: Coaching to Change Role
- The employee experience: coaching to support leaving an organisation
- Coaching to leave an organisation – redundancy
- The employee experience: Coaching to join an organisation
What did you learn about connection, belonging and engagement? What will you change in the way you interact with your team members to build that connection, belonging and engagement – all in service of better business results?
