CONNECTION in the Remote Work Era | Simon Sinek

One of the things we have to remember is that just because the business can function with a distributed workforce, with an online workforce, we know that there's a sacrifice. It's harder to build trust. If you've joined the company during COVID you've never physically met any of your colleagues or co workers.

It's much harder to build trust when we don't meet each other. We take for granted that when we go to the office, that the little brief interactions we have at work where you walk past somebody in the hall and say hello, or the talk going into the meeting and the talk coming out of the meeting and bumping into somebody going, oh, I meant to tell you something, or do you want to grab a coffee? No one of these things by themselves does anything, but over the course of time, they contribute to the building of trust, to the building of human relationships in an online context. We don't have any of the in between. All we have is the meeting. We log on, we log off, that's it. And so what a lot of companies haven't recognized is that building trust online is possible, but it actually requires more work. What used to happen just relatively organically now has to happen prescriptively. For example, I'm a huge fan of the Monday morning huddle. We do one on our team where on Monday morning the whole team comes together and there's no discussion of work or deadlines or workloads or anything. It's a human call where we simply say, what's on your heart and. And mind? And then we answer some funny or poignant question that's posed to us by the person who's leading the huddle that month.

And. And we simply talk about ourselves. And you learn a lot about somebody. You know, somebody will say, oh, I had a great weekend with my kids and we went, you know, we went hiking. I didn't even know that they had kids, you know, or somebody will say, to be honest, it was a really hard weekend. My father has cancer and he's in the hospital and he took a turn for the worst. And we start to see each other as human and we start to empathize and we start to create relationship and we start to get to know each other, but it's done prescriptively. We make it happen. I'm also a huge fan of turning on a zoom, for example, and just working like we're not actually working with each other. We're just in each other's screens as we're getting our own work done. It's nice to have Somebody there. I'm also believing about a huge fan of the telephone. You know, zooms are tiring, especially when you have them all day. You know, it's fake. You know, very often, you know, I'm looking at a dot at the top of my screen so that you'll think I'm making eye contact with you, but really I'm just staring at the dot at the top of my screen. Or if I'm staring at you, sometimes the placement of the camera, the screens, what you see is this, but I'm looking right at your eyes, you know, and so I think a telephone, believe it or not, is. Is actually a much better way to connect with somebody, especially when someone's distracted. When you can see that someone's doing email while you're talking to them. There's no actual polite way to say, can you stop doing that and listen to me, please? And we just sort of do it on a telephone. If you hear someone's distracted, you go, hello, you. There they go, sorry, sorry, sorry. You can actually catch people. And I find that those interactions. I'm a pacer. I like to pace when I'm on the phone, when I'm thinking. I can't pace on zoom, which means my thinking is junk, right? When I'm on a phone call, I can walk around. I can walk around wherever I go, and I can talk to somebody and I can be much more engaged. I think we, especially for salespeople, use the phone, pick up the phone. How are you? Wanting to check in with you, you know, have a conversation without zoom. I actually think it's actually much better for building relationship, believe it or not. Having zooms occasionally is great too. But I think we've. We've under. We've forgotten. We've forgotten how good the phone is.