The Impact Of Connecting At Work

Humans are social animals — we crave meaningful interaction with others. Unfortunately, when we don’t get enough of it, there can be serious repercussions. This need, unsurprisingly, carries over to our lives at work. We spend so many hours of our lives working that we can end up shorting ourselves on important interactions with family and friends, so it’s only natural that we crave real connections in our work environment.

In a 2018 survey of 20,000 U.S. adults by Cigna, the company found that there are consistent traits among those who lack a connection with others: “It was found that lonelier people are more likely to have infrequent in-person interactions, disagree that their ‘social skills’/relationship statuses are good, be in fair/poor overall, physical, and mental health, and have less balance in their lives — all of which are interconnected and come with repercussions of their own.” For instance, only 36% of those who never have in-person interactions say they get enough sleep (compared to half of those who have daily interactions), and only 37% say “they get the right amount of family time (vs. 65%).”

Furthermore, a whopping 50% of those who never have in-person interactions are in fair/poor overall health, and they have an even harder time finding balance in their lives: “Only a third (33%) of those in fair/poor overall health are getting the right amount of sleep (vs. 51% of those in good, very good or excellent overall health), while 38% of those in fair/poor overall health report working for the right amount of time (vs. 57% of those in good, very good or excellent overall health).”

For those of us who work alone as freelancers or those of us who work in the corporate world but feel overwhelmingly isolated, what can we do to ensure that we have a better quality of life? One answer seems to be that we should satisfy our need to belong at work, and that appears to come down to trust and respect. According to EY’s Belonging Barometer study, “more than half (56 percent) of respondents feel they belong most at work when they feel trusted and respected, with baby boomers feeling this way the most at 63 percent, compared to Gen X at 56 percent and millennials at 53 percent.”

People also want to feel as though they’re being heard and understood at their places of work. As EY’s study found, “thirty-nine percent of respondents feel they belong most at work when they have the ability to speak freely and voice their opinion.”

Having others show that they care also can play a role. As EY reported, “thirty-nine percent of respondents say that when colleagues check in with them about how they are doing both personally and professionally, they feel the greatest sense of belonging at work.” In fact, people appear to value check-ins more than public recognition, receiving invitations to events outside the office, being invited to meet with top leaders and inclusion in email conversations with top leaders.

And so we come to the crux of my point — we crave human contact. Even at work (or perhaps, for those who have few other human interactions, only at work), we want to feel that someone else cares enough about us to inquire about our well-being.

Clearly, it’s very important to connect at work. People tend to be less healthy and have less balance in their lives when they feel they exist in a vacuum.

You also can see the results of employees feeling engaged with other employees and engaged with their work in Gallup’s 2017 State of the American Workplace report. Business units that score high in the area of employee engagement have 41% lower absenteeism and 59% lower turnover than business units in the bottom quartile. In the same engaged group, there also were 70% fewer employee safety accidents. These, plus other positive statistics, help businesses in the top quartile realize a 21% higher profitability.

Interestingly, according to the Cigna survey, “loneliness scores differ when analyzed across age/generations. Gen Zers (adults ages 18-22) surveyed have a total average loneliness score of 48.3 — granting them the title of the loneliest generation — while scores gradually drop as respondents continue to age, culminating in a total average loneliness score of 38.6 for the least lonely group, the Greatest Generation (adults ages 72+).”

Therefore, while management might intuit that the portions of their workforces who are loneliest and most disengaged are their senior employees, they would be incorrect. The employees they may need to concentrate on keeping engaged are the junior employees. But, in actuality, every employee likely wants to feel engaged and acknowledged.

One of the important things to keep in mind when trying to engage people in the workplace is their communication preference. Some employees might prefer a face-to-face chat. Those who are much busier or working remotely might prefer a video chat. There are still other employees who really prefer an email. The key to making employees feel involved, seen and acknowledged is communicating with them in the method they find agreeable. Doing this shows that you respect their individual needs for communication, which can boost your image as a supervisor or manager who has excellent communication skills.

The general idea is that interacting with people is important. Encourage your employees to interrelate. Taking the hard line that “work is work” and “personal is personal” isn’t likely to win you any prizes. Today, meaningfully interacting with co-workers is how many people get their daily dose of humanity, and that can go a long way toward employee satisfaction and company productivity.

This article has previously been featured on Forbes

Cognitive Bias: Human Brains Are Only Human

Determining truth from what is believed to be true is a lot like being in the beginning of the movie The Matrix. As Morpheus explains to Neo, “You take the blue pill — the story ends; you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth — nothing more.”

Cognitive bias can be like taking the blue pill. You believe your brain is amazing and that it makes choices based on the facts. (And nothing but the facts.) Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works.

When people interpret new information that’s presented to them in ways that tend to support their already existing belief system, that’s cognitive bias at work. Not only will people interpret new data to conform to decisions they’ve already made in life (which neighborhood is best to raise their children in or which dog food best suits their golden retriever), these decisions (aligning with their prior decisions) make them feel reassured.

Cognitive bias is impactful not only on the day-to-day challenges of business leaders, but over time, they can become a self-fulfilling prophecy in some cases. If you favor the advice of senior team members to the exclusion of input from newer, perhaps more creative members, your authority bias is probably holding back the innovation of your group.

Cognitive bias can be especially detrimental to entrepreneurs. If you habitually overestimate the probability of positive results, you may find yourself engaging in overly risky business decisions thanks to your optimism bias.

The problem with the human brain is that there are several processes involved in logic, and they take time. We don’t have the time to study every conundrum enough to plan out a thorough and researched solution. You would never have enough hours in the day to decide the optimum length of a shoestring. How big is the shoe? How many turns does the string have to make to create a comfortable, yet efficient lace for the shoe at hand?

The human brain was originally built for survival. We had to make a quick decision between fight or flight to avoid being killed. In this instance, our ancestors needed some information processing shortcuts. The option chosen was probably the one that worked the last time the situation occurred. So, cognitive bias helped keep enough of us alive to be pondering the process today.

In my experience as a leadership development facilitator, I work with people who are frequently unaware of their own cognitive biases. Bringing biases to their attention is often helpful in professional growth.

There are three that can be particularly detrimental in the business world.

Confirmation Bias

Every one of us has our own worldview. If you belong to a particular political party, you’re more likely to read and watch news that supports that party’s rhetoric. If you subscribe to a certain religion, you probably don’t spend a lot of time with groups who subscribe to one that is the antithesis of yours. The problem with confirmation bias in a business environment is that objectivity is severely lacking. This can lead to critical missteps.

One solution to this dilemma is to ensure you’re working with a diverse group of people. The new ideas generated from this can send your team in a direction more valuable to the task at hand. Embrace criticisms and openly listen to suggestions you wouldn’t normally consider. If your group thinks alike, to begin with, try assigning someone to be a devil’s advocate and rotate that responsibility on a regular basis.

Loss Aversion Bias

This cognitive bias will keep you going down the road to nowhere because of all the time and effort you’ve put into building the road itself. It’s difficult to admit that something you’ve put so much work and resources into just isn’t panning out. Some teams have projects that limp along for years without anything to show for it.

If you take a step back to reevaluate, revisit and recalculate what’s going on with this project, you just might find it’s time to cut your losses.

Status Quo Bias

At some point in their working career, everyone has had at least one job where the leadership was held hostage by the status quo bias. The obvious signs are that they hate change, only focus on sameness, and they fear anything new. Their company mission statement reads something like this: That’s the Way We’ve Always Done It! Additionally, our brains like homeostasis so that energy is conserved for fight-or-flight situations.

If you think you have the energy to overcome this level of inertia, you’re pretty optimistic. In some situations, it might be worth a try. Do some research and offer an analysis to upper management showing how well other companies that embrace invention/innovation are doing financially. Offer to chair a committee focused on company procedures that could be streamlined or improved. (However, if you’re not getting any traction, it may be time to refer to the solution for loss aversion bias.)

Humans favor information that confirms their preconceptions. An experiment by Bharath Talluri and Anne Urai showed that when subjects were asked to identify which direction (counterclockwise or clockwise) a series of white dots (partially obscured by other dots) were moving after viewing two videos on a computer screen, their secondary choice was more likely to confirm their primary choice, indicating confirmation bias. This bias makes us shut out new ideas and possibilities — never a wise idea in the fast-paced world of business.

It’s challenging to face up to our own cognitive biases, and even more difficult to take the steps necessary to free ourselves from them. In the end, whether you’re an entrepreneur or a business leader, it will behoove you to make the conscious effort to not give in to your all-too-human inclination towards cognitive bias.

This article has previously been featured on Forbes

Are Your Employees Engaged At Work?

According to the latest Gallup Poll on employee engagement “The percentage of ‘engaged’ workers in the U.S. — those who are involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace — is now 34%, tying its highest level since Gallup began reporting the national figure in 2000.” Although this is good news — or at least, better news — the number of disengaged employees is still far too high.

The same poll places the percentage of “actively disengaged” workers (people with miserable work experiences) at 13%, leaving the majority at 53% “not engaged.” These workers don’t feel connected emotionally or cognitively and will be out the door at the first job opportunity that’s even marginally better.

Fifty-three percent. It boggles the mind. How are companies doing so many things so wrong that the majority of workers would rather do the minimum and punch a time clock than actively bring themselves to work alive, awake and ambitious for achieving greatness?

What is causing the disengagement, and what can we do as leaders to reduce it or eliminate it altogether? It’s an important puzzle to solve, because according to a report from Rapt Media, “Disengaged employees cost U.S. businesses $450-$550 billion in lost productivity annually.”

It’s incumbent upon leadership and management to actively confront the problem to get these numbers under control and re-engage their employees.

In its survey, Rapt Media found that 57% of employees “feel their leaders are detached from the workforce.” If managers spend most of their time in meetings or locked away in their offices, how will employees ever know if they understand or even care about what they do? Interpersonal connectivity is important in the workplace and goes a long way toward making employees feel valued by the company.

How many of your company’s managers, VPs and people in the C-suite know what their people do day to day? Do they have an idea of how the actual or virtual machinery works for the average worker on the line? If they don’t know, they ought to. The more distant a manager is from the front lines, the more of a disconnect their employees will feel from them and from their overall purpose in the organization.

If the company you work for has an open-door policy, encourage your employees to work within the system. Let them know you value their valid complaints, honest criticism, and ideas for improvement. Make them feel heard, and make a plan to incorporate some of the better ideas. When employees feel like they have some input at the company where they spend 40-plus hours of their lives every week, it makes a difference in their attitude.

If you’re committed to improving employee engagement in your company, a good place to start is by offering encouragement. Everyone likes to hear that they’re doing a good job. When was the last time you told an employee you were impressed with their project or presentation?

When your company or team is going through changes, do you keep your employees in the loop? When organizations don’t disseminate important information, rumor has a way of rearing its ugly head, and it’s a notorious productivity killer.

It’s not always better to give than receive, especially when it’s honest feedback. As a manager, you need to be open to feedback not only from your boss, but from your peers and your employees as well. In an environment where frequent feedback is the norm, engagement thrives.

Employees don’t want to be overworked, but they do want to be challenged. Constantly going back to your top employees with more of the same work because they’re good at it is a sure recipe for burnout. Instead, provide them with new tasks that will stretch their abilities. As Peter Kokkinos wrote for Inside HR, “Ambitious employees will want to remain innovative and grow their skill set. If they can develop new skills at your company, an offer to work elsewhere will be less appealing.”

Another way to create and maintain employee engagement is for the company to offer opportunities for professional development. Whether it’s cross-training with another department, training courses or certifications, these opportunities show employees that the company cares about their advancement and values knowledge building.

If your company is one that doesn’t put much stock in the idea that employee engagement is important, share this nugget of wisdom from the Gallup Poll: “Compared with business units in the bottom quartile, those in the top quartile of engagement realize substantially better customer engagement, higher productivity, better retention, fewer accidents, and 21% higher profitability.” You just might change their minds.

This article has previously been featured on Forbes

Saving Time With Structured Thinking

We’re all busy. Our personal lives are stuffed full of appointments. Our business lives have seemingly endless reports, deadlines, meetings and problems to solve. Time management has never been so important.

Although we have an amazing array of electronic gizmos, apps and programs to help us with everything from A to Z, we still get behind on tasks to accomplish and glitches to solve. One of the more annoying issues in the corporate world is the problem you think is fixed but isn’t.

How often have you and your team spent hours of valuable time trying to solve an important problem only to end up back where you started? Not only is the initial problem not resolved, but you’ve spent hours not resolving it.

It can be easy to think that you’re approaching the task in a logical fashion when in actuality, it’s organized chaos. Oftentimes, the root cause of this common difficulty is not fully understanding the parameters of the issue in the first place.

If you’ve ever worked in a help desk environment, you already know what I’m talking about. Sally in accounting puts in a trouble ticket because “the printer isn’t working.” Bob in the next cubicle reports that he “can’t print his presentation.” Larry’s ticket says that “the printer sorter function isn’t working.” If you have multiple technicians responding to these three tickets, it compounds the challenge.

However, if the trouble ticket system were made to batch all issues relating to one piece of equipment together in a logical fashion, one technician could immediately see that the printer in accounting is affecting three users in a similar way. Instead of three different technicians trying different fixes at different times, the process becomes reframed in a more logical way.

There are different ways to address a problem using a structured method, and you might find that one way works better for you. You could use a flow chart, for example, or a “Who? What? Where? When?” approach, where you answer all these questions as they relate to your problem. You could even make a list with a statement of the problem you want to solve, followed by all the ways you think you could solve it. When you’ve finished the list, you can go back through it and eliminate the ideas that are less practical, which will allow you to focus on the ideas that are more practical. The important thing is to use a structure.

The goal is to attain clarity. Start at the top: What is the problem you’re trying to solve? It may help you to come at this from another angle: What are the problems you’re not trying to solve (at the moment)? Only work with one problem at a time, and use one diagram per problem.

Structured thinking is also helpful in business communications. You might be amazed by how much meeting time you can save if you stick to just one specific subject. Use a structured graph (or another structured visual aid) that the group can follow. Don’t allow anyone to stray off topic. Set a finite time for the meeting, and end when you have enough data and input to deal with the one problem. A different problem requires a separate structured visual aid and a separate meeting. Don’t let one topic bleed over into a related topic if it isn’t central to solving the problem you’re currently working on.

Structured communication can be especially important when you’re interacting with upper management. This group of people often has more on their plates than you might realize. Many of us have been conditioned to begin a conversation about a problem at the beginning and share the facts involved and the decision process that we followed before we ever get to the conclusion. We share the solution at the end of the conversation. By then, the vice president’s eyes have probably glazed over, and he’s probably thinking about the conference call he has in five minutes — not what you’re prattling on about.

Fight your instincts, and begin your interaction with the solution to the problem. Executives often want you to get to the point, and they often prefer to hear the answer first. Then, if necessary, you can provide your supporting research. Unbeknownst to you, the executive may already have come to the same conclusion and is just waiting for your corroboration — in which case, you may not even need to go into the reasons for your decision. How efficient is that?

Carry this idea over into your business writing as well. It may help your readers understand what you’re trying to convey with greater speed and accuracy. Most people hate rambling emails. They’re inefficient, and after the first paragraph, most people have zoned out. As Barbara Minto writes in her book The Pyramid Principle, “Controlling the sequence in which you present your ideas is the single most important act necessary to clear writing. The clearest sequence is always to give the summarizing idea before you give the individual ideas being summarized.”

Structured thinking and structured communication may not come easily to you right out of the gate. These skills, like any others, may require some practice, but the more time you put into perfecting your use of them, the more time you’ll likely save each and every day. That’s certainly worth the effort.

This article has previously been featured on Forbes

Creating An Ethical Workplace May Not Be Easy, But Is It Critical? Yes, It Is

In today’s difficult business environment, it can be easy to overlook ethical dilemmas in the workplace out of sheer exasperation. But when a company makes the effort to treat employees in a fair and consistent manner, it can reap the benefits of having employees who internalize the company’s high ethical values as their own.

What would your employees do if they thought no one was watching? We’d like to believe that they would behave honestly, ethically and with the best interests of the company at heart. Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, there’s always a chance that, when you’re not paying attention, a (hopefully) small percentage of people will try to get away with something on the company’s dime.

It may be something relatively benign, like adding an extra few minutes to their lunch break here and there, or it may be something much more serious, such as someone in accounting padding vendor checks to get kickbacks.

Unethical behavior isn’t just black and white.

There are many shades of gray, and there may be an entire spectrum of unethical behaviors plaguing your workplace.

You may have a manager who is pushing salespeople to peddle a shoddy product instead of reporting the known product faults to engineering. She might think she’s doing you a favor by getting rid of the merchandise languishing in the warehouse, or she might have her eye on a fat bonus check at the end of the quarter. Either way, her behavior can be defined as unethical.

Perhaps there’s a supervisor promising overtime to the loading dock employees just to get the job done, knowing full well that the overtime will not be paid. When a dock employee finds her week’s paycheck is short, she might start intentionally damaging shipments to retaliate. It’s easy for company morale and ethical behavior to tank faster than you’d think. It rarely stays static — it’s likely to fluctuate — or even snowball.

In an article for Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, Carmen Nobel wrote about the telephone conversations professor Eugene Soltes had with Bernie Madoff (who was serving a prison sentence for his giant Ponzi scheme). One of Madoff’s quotes reads, “It wasn’t like I was being blackmailed into doing something, or that I was afraid of getting caught doing it … I, sort of, you know, I sort of rationalized that what I was doing was OK, that it wasn’t going to hurt anybody.”

Ethical behavior is vital in organizational excellence.

Without ethical behavior, it’s much too easy for the slide down the slippery slope to begin.

To encourage ethical behavior in the workplace, it’s important to create a tangible definition of what ethical behavior is and what it is not. With mergers, transfers and new hires, there is no way to know what prior standard of ethical behavior was expected. Give some time and thought into how the company values are communicated to each and every employee.

The Ethics & Compliance Initiative’s 2018 report, “Building Companies Where Values and Ethical Conduct Matter,” found that “Employees who agree that their managers and supervisors talk about the importance of ethics are almost 12 times more likely to believe that their organization encourages them to speak up.”

No matter how honest you believe your staff to be, there is always the chance that someone will be tempted to push the limits of ethical behavior. However, when you embed a check-and-balance arrangement into critical procedures, the odds of anyone doing so diminish.

If an employee does manage to break your trust by acting unethically after being informed of the company’s code of behavior, carry through with the consequences. If Sally pads her expense report and nothing happens to her as a result, the message sent to her colleagues is that it’s OK to lie about the cost of their mileage, too. If instead, Sally is reprimanded for such an action, employees will know that your company is serious about upholding its ethical commitments.

Don’t forget to show appreciation for those who exemplify the values your company strives to live by. Recognition of these individuals reinforces to the group at large your commitment to ethical behavior.

One of the best ways to discourage unethical behavior is to lead by example. If the management team displays model behavior, the rest of the staff can readily see what is expected of them.

Ensure there is a written code of conduct for all employees that everyone, from the top down, is aware of. Have a company mission statement that specifically mentions the priority placed on ethical behavior and living the stated values.

It’s easy to simply hire the candidate that best matches the tangible qualifications for the job. He has a related degree, years of experience and has worked with the department’s software. But, what are the candidate’s values? Is he honest? Is he fair with customers and co-workers? Can he readily own up to his own errors? I believe it’s important, now more than ever, to hire with an eye towards applicants who show ethical tendencies.

Ethics training can be a valuable addition to the orientation presentation. In this forum, proper attention can be given to the company’s stance on nondisclosure of proprietary information, the posting of negative comments on social media and even on the particulars of the sexual harassment and interdepartmental dating policies.

The bottom line is that unethical behavior can and will eventually undo any company or any individual. It’s worth the time and effort to create an ethical workplace for everyone.

This article has previously been featured on Forbes