Building Human Connection in a Remote World
The best way for leaders to develop employee engagement is through personal connection. This requires purposeful strategies in a virtual setting.
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Employee engagement — the measure of individual commitment to organizational success — positively correlates with discretionary effort and meaningfully impacts every individual and organizational performance metric that matters. However, despite significant investments across most industries, leading engagement studies have never found more than 36% of employees engaged at work.
The Gallup Q12 survey tool, which some consider the gold standard for measuring employee engagement, assesses what it considers to be the 12 most powerful predictors of discretionary effort. Ten of the 12 focus on human relationships, dynamics, or exchanges. Engagement and discretionary effort, then, are driven by healthy and productive human connection. That can be achieved only on a team-by-team basis.
If engagement was a steep hill pre-COVID, it’s Mount Everest in the hybrid world. Still, the overwhelming majority of intrinsic motivation and engagement —70% — is the result of an employee’s relationship with their boss, which means that managers, more than any other individuals, have a mountain to climb to attain them.
How best to boost engagement and commitment within teams? It happens through connection and, when possible, by exercising their own referent power.
Building the Power to Engage
Organizational psychology describes two types of relational power within organizations: positional and referent. Positional power, bestowed by the organization, is hierarchical, rigid, and necessarily scarce. The other side of the coin is referent power, which is earned, nonhierarchical, and organic. People with referent power yield disproportionate influence across the organization. Unlike positional power, anyone can acquire referent power, which is driven by human engagement.
If employee engagement creates individual commitment to organizational success, referent power creates individual commitment to one’s own success. When people comply with referent power, they do so because they want to, tapping into powerful intrinsic motivation. Leading with referent power sets a high floor for team performance, and there is virtually no ceiling. Of course, it’s not always possible to take that approach; many situations and/or direct reports need to be managed through positional power. But as a general rule, the more leaders exercise referent power, the better their teams will perform and the further their own careers will go.
There are three sources of referent power, the first of which is shared wisdom, which can be either proactive or reactive. The most effective leaders engage regularly with their teams and look for real-time opportunities to share wisdom. However, that wisdom is always offered as a perspective to be considered rather than an order to be followed. This is how they avoid micromanaging and thus bolster performance and engagement. Shared wisdom must also be reactive. Before the shift to hybrid work, people could make eye contact or stand outside an office door when they had urgent questions. The best bosses always found a way to get them what they needed.
The persuasive power of “authority” has been well understood at least since Robert Cialdini’s book Influence was published in 1984. People trust experts, but the ways in which their expertise is established and shared matter a great deal. “I’ve been doing this for 20 years” does not establish expertise; it asks for a leap of faith. But when managers can say, “I was once in a similar position, and here’s what we did that worked,” their contextual understanding of the situation signals their expertise and supportiveness.
The second source of referent power is charisma and optimism, which can be developed over time. One behavioral approach to establishing charisma is to demonstrate warmth, which can be done in almost infinite ways in the physical workplace: a look and a smile, encouraging gestures, positive body language, nodding at the right moments. But nothing conveys warmth more powerfully than our actions: remembering details of people’s lives and asking about them, showing concern where appropriate, paying full attention, validating opinions. Wherever we may be, the ways in which we treat people result in our referent power or lack thereof.
The third source of referent power is the most powerful and enduring, as well as the most accessible: friendship and loyalty. Building these ties simply requires intention: “I’m going to learn more about my colleague tomorrow, discover a shared interest, and tell them why I enjoy working with them.” Fostering friendship and loyalty at work begins with curiosity — asking people questions about their passions, perspectives, priorities, and ideals.
In Influence, Cialdini describes an experiment he conducted in which teams of students from different graduate schools were assigned to conduct negotiation exercises with each other. Teams that were told “Time is money; get down to business” successfully negotiated a deal 50% of the time. Teams told to “take some time to identify shared interests before you begin the exercise” successfully negotiated a deal 95% of the time. In other words, negotiating teams were found to be twice as likely to reach a successful conclusion if they were able to identify shared interests before the negotiation started.
Discovering shared interests with the people on your team can be the key to the door of engagement. Do whatever you can to find them, and use them at every opportunity. Nobody gets sick of talking about their passions.
Making the Most of Virtual Venues
Pre-pandemic, people acquired referent power, often unconsciously, in environments that were conducive to building friendships and loyalty, by having conversations at the watercooler and in hallways, walking into meetings together, and getting together for lunch or after-work drinks.
But the only reliable way to build referent power in a remote environment is virtually and intentionally. While shared interests are among the most powerful drivers of friendship and loyalty, the hybrid world significantly minimizes opportunities for them to surface organically. It’s incumbent upon leaders to seek any opportunity to surface shared interests with their colleagues and teams.
The following suggestions can help leaders foster engagement and develop their referent power with employees when they can’t all be there in person.
Think Like a Host
Whenever we invite someone to a virtual meeting, we’re inviting them to our own personal watercooler, restaurant, or coffee shop. What are we doing to make it a place that people want to be? Metaphorically speaking, what’s the decor? How’s the music? What’s the crowd like? There are many ways to be a good host, but a blurry Zoom background and zero banter won’t likely get you many rave reviews.
Modern leadership requires new skills and approaches to building and maintaining relationships: virtual hospitality.
Merely accomplishing the goals of a virtual meeting does not make it successful. There must be human connection for us to have any chance of motivating and engaging our teams and colleagues. Yes, goals must be accomplished. But laughter must also be heard. Personal stories must be shared. Words of affirmation must be exchanged. Gestures of kindness must be demonstrated. And team identity must be solidified.
The only way that can happen is by paying as much attention to the experience of your meeting as you do to its outcomes.
Make Your Zoom Room a Reflection of You
If shared interests are one of the key components to likability, then there is no better use of a Zoom background than as a billboard for your (work-appropriate) personal interests. Anything in your background that can spark an interesting discussion is invaluable: pieces of art; mementos from travel; musical instruments; family artifacts; evidence of a fandom, hobby, or interest. If someone sees something in your background that they like, you connect before a word is spoken. Even when the interest isn’t shared, the authenticity revealed often leads to the very connection that fosters friendship and loyalty.
That said, the circumstances allowing people the freedom to personalize their backgrounds are hardly a given. However, everyone can download a picture and use that as their background. It could be anything appropriate that matters to them or will make people smile.
Apply the ‘First Five Minutes’ Rule
If you get down to business right at the start of a meeting, you obliterate your opportunity to nurture your most important assets: human relationships. The first five minutes of every virtual meeting — whether one-on-ones, team meetings, sales meetings, or client meetings — must be devoted to personal connection. And five minutes is only a guide. If your connection is organically taking you past five minutes, let it. There is no better ROI for your career than connecting personally with the people in your network.
If you’re a team leader, it’s not enough to leave it to chance. In a group setting, have some questions at the ready in case you need to break the ice: “Let’s go around the table. Everyone gets 30 seconds to tell us about your best meal ever/your first concert without parents/one of your favorite movies/your first interview here,” or whatever option you choose. And with individuals, remember what leads to liking: curiosity, compliments, and shared interests. The most effective way to discover shared interests is by asking questions, which in and of itself makes us more likable by demonstrating curiosity. Focusing on questions and experiences in the first five minutes of every meeting will almost certainly boost your outcomes, your referent power, and your career progress. And the best part is, it’s much more fun than the alternative of getting straight to business.
Don’t Ignore Your People
Imagine this scenario: You’re in the office. One of your team members tries to get your attention on four different occasions, but each time you respond with “Later.” Now imagine it’s 5 p.m. and you haven’t yet spoken with that person, who is still in the office. Would you just leave, without even saying goodbye? It’s unthinkable — you would never do that to anyone and expect them to want to work for you.
But that is exactly what we do every time we ignore an email, Slack message, or text. Every ignored digital communication lets the air out of someone’s tires. The frequency with which it happens is either the symptom or cause of toxic thoughtlessness in the work culture that can be addressed only through human connection.
Create Opportunities for Engagement
The importance of referent power means that it is not enough to wait for opportunities for connection to arise in the standard course of operations. The best leaders create those opportunities to ensure that they happen. One of the best practical ways to do so are with periodic “lunch and learns” or, my own twist on the classic, “how-to happy hours.” Lunch-and-learn sessions involve team members and guest speakers presenting internally and informally during lunchtime. Topics can span a wide range, from employees’ personal passions to areas that are salient to professional development. But the content is secondary (which is why it’s better to err on the side of fun over useful). The purpose is connection, togetherness, and team identity. How-to happy hours are exactly the same, except after 5 p.m. and with people drinking their beverage of choice. Attendance is always optional.
Fun twists on lunch and learns or how-to happy hours are to make them collaborative events, using prompts such as “Everyone gets six minutes to tell the story of the worst job they ever had” or any number of comedy improv exercises.
On the development front, it’s great to bring in experts to present. But it’s even better to create experts to present. Try assigning topics for research and presentation, but choose the topics with team members to ensure that they’re passionate about them.
Hybrid work has upended how people have traditionally connected, requiring new strategies. Referent power triggers intrinsic motivation and engagement, supporting employee performance. Building and maintaining referent power in a hybrid world takes work and intention, but it’s critical to driving long-term team performance. Thinking like a host, personalizing Zoom backgrounds, starting every meeting with opportunities for personal connection, always responding to team members, and scheduling group events are examples of intentional strategies for developing referent power in virtual settings, thereby boosting engagement.
When employees are engaged, they try harder, and it shows up everywhere that matters: profitability, productivity, innovation, customer satisfaction, safety, and retention. The things that lead to objective and easy-to-measure wins are themselves subjective and extremely difficult to measure. If we want objective and measurable wins, subjective and immeasurable paths are the most direct way to get there. In today’s hybrid world, if we want our teams to perform at their best, focusing on the human connection has never been more important.
