CEOs, let's reimagine connection at work.
This month, I was a participant in a discussion on Quiet Quitting at the World Economic Forum's annual gathering in Davos. The workforce is changing rapidly, and it strikes me that as the leaders have been asking a lot of the appropriate questions. how to balance the benefits and drawbacks of remote work as well as the opportunities and risks offered with AI, the need to develop an environment that is more welcoming and sustainable.
One question, however, is deserving of more attention: if the workforce of our generation is evolving technologically as well as post-pandemic behavior and standards are changing...don't us as leaders need to adapt?
There's a whole Generation of Digital Natives who are entering the working world. They grew up creating and sharing video instead of making calls or texts, and are able to consider TikTok or YouTube their primary source of information. In their personal lives, they are hyper-connected and equally hyper-engaged.
However, in their professional lives, it's a different story. We're witnessing significant reductions in engagement and employee satisfaction in remote Gen Z and younger millennials. A mere four percent of younger employees who are remote or hybrid are aware of what's expected of them at work, and more than half Gen Z employees are ambivalent or not engaged at work. If we view employee engagement as the most important indicator for workforce productivity and productivity, it has significant implications for every company and every profit.
What's causing this disconnection? At work, as well as in our lives it is common for us to want to belong to something greater than ourselves. It is our natural desire to belong, to feel an identity that is open, honest and human. However, the more our population becomes digitally distributed and AI-enabled and ad-hoc, the harder it is to feel a genuine connections every single day. Particularly, if we've not changed our methods of working to accommodate the next generation. We still ask our employees to read through a mountain of documentation, write lengthy emails, as well as attend boring meetings. They learn about layoffs and company priorities through comms made up of scripts and automated that they could be produced via ChatGPT. Our only insight as managers have comes through cookie-cutter engagement surveys or live events with low tune-in and high drop-off rates, and the occasional snarky chat or Q&A.
The traditional managerial model is not working for us. It's time to adapt how we as leaders show up and interact with our staff. Just as we are focused on improving the skills of our employees with regard to changes in population size, demographics and technology trends as well, we must improve our leadership skills, to better build trust and connection at large.
I've tried a lot of this during the past several years . These are the things I've been learning and applying, that I believe can help us show up differently and lead more effectively:
1. Be authentic, you are who you are.
When the outbreak, I hosted an international town hall from my parents' home located in Flint, Michigan -- sleep deprived, wearing my pajamas made of velour, and my toddler son as well as my grandmother moving between the background.
This could have been the most effective communication ever.
Why? because it was not scripted as well as messy, vulnerable and awkward. It's easy to fall into "us versus us versus them" interactions when we work in a workplace, especially in times of stress and challenge. It's easy to think of "leadership" as a nameless and faceless machine. Being video-first and visual in your communication can be a potent deterrent. It forces you to remove the mask and protection of writing and editing comms. The most effective way to make it clear is to present yourself just as you really are.
By the way, there is a lot of instances of leaders who were vulnerable, and this backfiring...but I would guess that in the majority instances the problem was that the leader was performing too much. The key is to accept to allow that part of yourself to fall short before your group. We all have flaws that are humans. Everyone wants to see our leaders be brave -- it only encourages us to emulate them even more.
2. Begin by asking the "why ."
Like many leaders have had to make difficult choices in the last year. In the past, I've made executive decisions and laidoffs to re-organizing and shutting down projects to improve efficiency. It's my responsibility to take the tough, unpopular calls and enact changes quickly across our organization.
Increasingly, I see employees wanting to know the reasoning behind their decisions-- not just the "what" however, but the "why". This includes a desire to comprehend the larger environment of competition, the trade-offs balanced and weighed, and the process that was used and at what time.
The old comms playbook suggests that when you have an important communication issue and limited attention, you start with the "what" then get straight to the essential steps. However, I've been better at getting my team to make a decision when I approach my employees as the key stakeholders who deserve to understand the context.
In the end, starting with "why" is a first principle for all comms at . Of course there are always limitations to fully transparency (legal or PR-related, governance, customer risk) however I've observed that most of the time perceived obstacles to transparency are simply that. Perceived. The public may not always be with your choices, but you could say that if they disagree, you probably aren't doing your job. They will however appreciate and accept your choices in the beginning when you understand the reasons behind them.
3. Spend money on in-person meetings or in-person meetings, and make it personal.
Sure, I see the irony of the chief executive of a company that produces videos saying this. However, one of my most important learnings from the past couple of months is that we've waited too long and weren't conscious enough about bringing our teams closer in real life.
In January, a week after announcing layoffs, we hosted a company kickoff in NYC. We flew in employees from over 12 nations. Our employees were based in Ukraine who traveled by train or planes to reach us. We eschew the usual event confetti and opted for the more casual look with a tight budget. This was among the most energizing and needed choices I've made.
It is even more powerful for leaders when you get on a plane and visit your team wherever they are. We have an entirely distributed executive team spread across eight different locations starting from Seattle to Switzerland. The majority of them were recruited in the last year so are still new, and we are just starting to become a cohesive team. In order to speed up the process of forming a cohesive team the team, we began hosting offsites in each leader's home city. Our CFO's mother gathered us around her fire pit in Vermont. Our Head of Sales was wearing his apron and made us frittatas for breakfast. Our working sessions were held at our Chef of Product's table.
The outbreak provided us with an unintentional glimpse into others' homes and personal lives . If we take advantage of that and integrate it into our day-to-day it is possible to form more cohesive and higher-performing teams.
4. You can go between "lean back" to "lean forward" experiences.
An essential communication ability can be expected to develop the capacity to create "lean forward" experiences, instead of "lean back" broadcasts. We humans have attention spans are getting shorter (now lower than the eight-second mark which is less than the length of the length of a goldfish!). However, we communicate via one-to-many emails, be it through an email you read or a highly produced town hall that you sit and observe.
We can see this burden on engagement surfacing in our own data, where the average time to drop off from watching videos has been declining over the past couple of years. If we do not change our approach, tune-out will seriously hinder our ability to keep our teams aligned and efficient.
The key here is shifting our thinking and be open to trying new things. We have a new generation entering the workforce who is ahead of us in their ability to create and record authentic and rich information. They are ahead because they are free of the limitations that our generation faced throughout the decades of traditional communications methods at work.
The truth is that employees don't quit their jobs, they just let managers go. The CEOs are, in fact, the best managers. And according to the findings of a research study that included more than 113,000 executives, the number one element of effective leader is the trust of their employees. We as leaders must show ourselves how to show up in more authentic, interesting, and trustworthy methods. I'm betting that the CEOs who embrace this brave new world will be more successful in overseeing the next generation of workers. They will better inform and involve teams distributed across the globe, align people to better outcomes and establish lasting relationships that bring out extraordinary work. They'll stop communicating and make connections more effectively.