The purpose of so many organizational teams, like innovation labs, and startup ecosystems, like Silicon Valley, is to disrupt the status quo. I’ve written about why we need to disrupt our workplaces and how to do it. The thing is that when the status quo is disrupted the people who are part of it have their lives turned upside down. We needn’t look much farther than taxi drivers who have had their worlds rocked by Uber or countless renters being priced out of their communities because of Airbnb. Just like we need disruption to keep improving on what’s not working, our communities also need ways to stay connected. Here are five ways to connect your workplace.
Foundational requirement: a culture of co-operative sharing
Co-operatives are member-owned enterprises. Two of the principles that guide co-ops are sharing information and co-operating with other co-ops (and each other). A culture of cooperation is essential for meaningful and lasting workplace connections. People need to be authentically motivated by sharing ideas, tactics and work-hacks with each other. Building this muscle in your community enhances engagement, wellness, productivity, innovation, and even career development.
Peer mentoring
Whether it’s part of an onboarding experience, like at John Deere, or part of a leadership development program, like at Vancity Credit Union (where I work), peer mentoring aligns the building of knowledge and/or personal growth with social connections. Fast Company’s Kate Ward highlights the importance of mentorship programs for women leaders as well as “job hopping” Millennial employees:
Mentorship programs are in high demand, particularly from people in the earlier stages of their careers. If done well, they can be a way to keep employees happy and loyal even when you can’t afford to pay the highest salaries or offer the hottest benefits. Mentorship programs can also be a way to hang onto the “job-hopping generation” by providing them with the feedback and connection they crave.
The key to successful programs, argues Ward, is that they need to foster human connections that go beyond an interest-matching survey. Mentoring is different for everyone, so a variety of experiences will enhance participation and improve results.
Coaching
The ultimate purpose of coaching is to raise awareness for individuals and support their commitment to action. Coaches use two foundational skills, open listening and powerful questions, to shift peoples’ perspectives and take responsibility for what happens next. At scale, coaching enhances connectivity at work because it builds trust and capability through ongoing practice and also empowers people to make their own decisions (as opposed to sending ideas through seven layers of management). Check out this awesome case for peer coaching as an antidote to workplace loneliness from HBR’s Norian Caporale-Berkowitz and Stewart D. Friedman:
Peer coaching is about cultivating a network of allies that can provide mutual support in creating positive change to improve performance. In addition to its many benefits for learning, these relationships address the roots of loneliness at work. On the surface, peer coaching might look like low-budget professional coaching. Employees gain new perspectives on their issues and opportunities, as well as accountability partners to improve follow-through on creating change, but without paying professional coaching fees. But it’s much more than that. When organizations invest in peer coaching systems they signal a cultural shift that normalizes talking candidly about life with colleagues. Employees gain feelings of connection, trust increases, and individuals develop insights into their own problems through helping others. Peer coaching provides opportunities for one-on-one connection and demonstrates that our inner lives are welcome in the workplace.
Peer coaching puts value on human connection at work, makes small talk better and increases psychological safety.
Collaborative technology
The future of learning is sharing and, if you believe that learning happens everywhere and all the time when we reflect on experiences, the future is already here. Rather than investing in robust learning management systems, organizations can achieve scalable and positive impact by building or buying platforms that allow content to be curated, organized and shared from employee to employee. Teams of learning professionals, like the one I lead at Vancity, focus less on building content from scratch and more on understanding platform learning and teaching folks in our organization how to design their own cool content. As a guest on Jacob Morgan’s “Future of Work” podcast, Unilever’s Chief Learning Officer, Tim Munden, shared how their organization is trying to crack the code in terms of viral learning content:
We’re not there yet. We’re not there because people don’t have that way of thinking about learning. You see it evolving in their personal lives. We’re not yet there. That, for me, would be the point at which this catches fire. So let me make that practical using an example for myself. Now I discover a new piece of learning tech that works really well or a new trick in Degree [the brand] that I can use. I share it, it goes viral because it’s rated highly. Other people build on it. That’s learning really fueling the business. That’s really number one.
Forced friendships
I will share a meal with anyone. Period. You might not share my unbridled extroversion or love of making new friends, but you probably see the value in becoming more deeply connected to other leaders in your organization. What if you were given a gift card for a local restaurant and the name of a key stakeholder – for me it might be someone in digital products or finance – with the instructions to arrange a lunch date with that person? Some of you might feel nervous of the blind-date-ness of this approach, but the facts are that human relationships drive business results and the more we build networks beyond our cubicles, departmental floors and/or buildings the more connected we’ll make our workplaces. These “forced friendships” can become real when colleagues move conversations and experiences beyond the workplace and when issues are shared that require trust and discretion.
Living libraries
One of the greatest risks for organizations is the transition of knowledge from veteran employees to the emerging subject matter experts in the field – so many companies are experiencing a mass exodus of Baby Boomers who are bringing with them priceless information that was never written down. A solution to this challenge (one that also fosters organizational connectivity) is to create a living library of individuals with unique or important stories to tell who can be “signed out” by folks in the organization for short meetings that focus on sharing information, giving advice or helping to solve complex problems. This kind of knowledge sharing and mentorship activates retirement-age employees as thought leaders and also builds the knowledge of newer employees. The living library experience can also mitigate our unconscious biases because the “books” that readers sign out can offer different perspectives about how decisions are made and how work gets done.
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This article was originally published on January 23, 2019