155 | The Overlooked Art of Building Connection at Work | Scott McInnes with Christine Armstrong

I think the real work isn't in these one sweep of the wand things. It's in lots and lots and lots of small interactions. And lots of businesses that I would talk to would say, that's too much time, it's too much money. And I would say, that's fine, I get it. It is. It's a lot of those things. But the alternative is high turnover, less discretionary effort, and a lot of cost on recruitment. So it's, you know, it's up to you.

At Inspiring Change, we help our clients build work cultures that bring out the best in their people. We created this podcast to share real stories and insights from those who are shaping better workplaces every day. So grab a cuppa and pop in your earbuds wherever you are. You're very welcome to the Building Better Cultures podcast. We're excited to have you with us. Hello there and welcome to this episode of the Building Better Cultures podcast with me, Scott McInnes. Lovely to have you back. If this is, if you're a repeat visitor, quick thing before we kick off, I always say this, but it would really help if you could just take 10 10 seconds, 20 seconds, please, as you're listening to this episode, to give us a quick little rating and maybe a comment. It does really help to get us out there and spread the good word. And I think that a lot of the stuff that we put out on this podcast is helpful and practical, and that's certainly the feedback that we hear. So we'd love to get in front of more people. So your help in doing that would be very much appreciated. So thank you very much. Uh, today's guest, we're gonna be talking about something which is very close to my own heart, which is the idea of connection.. And I first met Christine Armstrong at the Talent Summit in Dublin, where she was keynoting. If you need a keynote speaker, she's very, very good. In fact, on her LinkedIn at the moment and on her website, you'll find a video about what a good keynote speaker she is. So pop along there and have a look at that. But anyway, I digress. We'll get more into that in a second. Christine's all about big world of work trends. She's all about equipping leaders and teams to rebuild connection, culture, momentum, That all started back in the '80s in advertising. I started my career in PR. It's cut and thrust and great crack. It's really interesting that where her work started was actually in looking to see where teams, how teams can align and deliver when competing workplace trends are really kind of getting in the way and threatening to pull apart those teams. So she looks at organizational culture, team dynamics, cross-generational and cross-cultural communication. And the practical realities. And this is a huge one for us here at Inspiring Change, the practical realities of leading groups through change. Whenever I'm talking about change, I'm always minded of that Peter Senge quote, "People don't resist change, they just resist being changed." Christine's work very much sits in that space. Hello, Christine, how are we getting on?

Good. Lovely to see you, Scott.

Yeah, it's been a couple of months since Talent Summit, and I know for you it's been a busy couple of months. So thanks for joining us. Let's kick off with a big question, and then we can go from there and see where we get to. When we spoke on our discovery call, you spoke about the joy of connection and the power of connection. So I'm wondering, why is it you believe that is so fundamentally important in the world of work? And probably more importantly, why is it that we are talking about that? We seem to be hearing a lot about it on socials and at conferences and in keynotes. Why are we talking about it so much now?

So what I'm hearing from clients day in, day out is connection in organizations has crumbled in the last 10 years. The connections between us have been pulled apart by almost every big trend in the world of work. So if you think about hybrid working, remote working, overwhelm of incoming messages, hot desking, all of these things, agile teams that change all the time, think about all of those things. They all divide us. And when I've just done a whole bank of 30 in-depth interviews with people who started their career at different points. And the question I've been asking is, tell me about when you first walked through the doors of whatever you consider to be your first grown-up job to be. You know, people who started in the '70s, '80s, '90s, 2000s. I interviewed somebody recently who started in 2018, so not that long ago, as an engineer at a big engineering firm. And he said, that first year of my career, that was a golden year. I went in as a junior engineer and I sat across the desk from a senior engineer, and we had soldering irons and all of our equipment, and I just copied what he did. He'd give me bits, and I learned on the job, and it 'was wonderful and I was really connected to that person and I felt really cared for.' He then went back to university for a year and then went back in COVID and he said it was just never the same because actually we didn't know how to replicate that online. We didn't build that relationship, that hands-on experience. And what I see again and again is organizations struggling so hard to rebuild connections that came naturally in a world where people together, quite stressed often, but highs and lows, sort of 5 days a week in the same place, working together in teams. Very often when I talk to people, you know, about their careers in the '80s, '90s, early 2000s, they're like, oh God, you know, we were mates, we went out together, you know, they're still my friends now, we train together from, you know, periods of time offsite. It's real investment of people that we've just lost in so many workplaces.

There is such a lot to unravel in that. And I think that a lot of what we're seeing today when it comes to the trend of kind of, or the downward trend of connection, connections breaking and loosening, people are blaming COVID. So, well, you know, this was all a COVID thing. It was all fine before COVID and since COVID it's been horrible, and we just haven't managed to find the right way to get it done and maintain or rebuild that connection. Was it all COVID?

No, it's not. It's lots of different things. I think people who don't like it blame COVID. So people who want everybody back 5 days say, well, it's just COVID and we should never have done this. I think the problem, the reason that COVID was so impactful in terms of hybrid work and remote work was because when I was doing this work prior to COVID, people were so overwhelmed. We were kind of in that boiled frog world where those of us— so I started my career in sort of mid-late '90s, and we didn't have email when I started. We certainly didn't have BlackBerrys and laptops. So over the period of my career, work has got bigger and bigger and bigger. It's got more international, more online, longer hours, constant interruption. And that's just happened really slowly. And by the end of the sort of the teens, the 20-teens, people were saying to me all the time, I just feel so overwhelmed. I don't know how to— work never stops. Stops. I'm pinged all the time. I'm in the office 5 days a week and then I go home and then I get messages and I never see my kids and I, you know, I can't have a dog and da da da. And then COVID kind of came along and it was an answer that people didn't quite know that they were looking for, but it was an answer. It was like, okay, well, how about if you could work at home 2 days a week? Maybe you could manage this better. And people went, oh, maybe I could manage this better. Maybe I could take the kids to school 2 days a week. Maybe I could get the car serviced. Maybe I could just think. And not be interrupted constantly. And that really changed things. And the only people who didn't seem to understand the value of that were people who were very senior, who love offices and/or, usually both, have a lot of domestic support. So often they're people with a partner at home or they can afford domestic support in other ways, cleaners, etc. And so they didn't understand why this was so important to people. And I think we still see that tension. So I don't think it is just COVID, but I do think that COVID added to a sort of a change that's come through technology of pulling apart the ties, but a lot of pulling apart of these workplace ties has been done deliberately by leaders. So hot desking is a deliberate policy. You know, overwhelming people with calls and emails, it probably wasn't a deliberate policy, but it's been sanctioned by leaders who haven't stopped it. So lots of the other things, agile teams, are deliberate policies. And I think we've done them without fully understanding the discretionary effort people make when they care about their colleagues.

The sense that I get is that senior leaders didn't put in hot desking or didn't put in new comms channels or didn't put in new ways of doing things or, you know, any of that with the express intention of creating disconnection. It's just a very, very unfortunate outcome of the way now that we work. So what is it that organizations should be doing to try and rebuild some of these connections that we've lost?

The challenge to answer that question is that it isn't one move. So what organizations want is they want a one move. They're like, right, we'll go back to full time in the office. We'll put in pizza and beer every other Thursday. They want the one note answer and it doesn't work. Yesterday I was in Wrexham with Moneypenny. Now Moneypenny run what the rest of us would call call centers. They object to the term, but it makes it easy to tell you what they do if I just call them call centers for lots and lots of different organizations. And what they realized was that that's a really tough job because people don't usually call call centers unless they're quite pissed off about stuff. And so it can be quite stressful. And so they said, okay, how could we create the best world of work where people would want to work answering calls for customers? And they've designed a beautiful, beautiful office. They've thought about everything. They've subsidized food. There's free breakfast. But from the very first moment you engage with them, when you go in for an assessment, they were doing jigsaws in a big treehouse and they were watching how they interact. And they said, we hire smiley, happy people.. And then they put them on a 6-month training group. They have a cohort. They have a big cupboard with birthday presents. When it's somebody on the team's birthday, you can go and choose someone. And they have amazing parties. And basically, they've kind of gone through their whole work experience and they've created what they described as a cocktail. I think that's lovely language, a cocktail of different elements that bring people together, get them working together, make it a great place to work, even though it's a tough job. And the statistics on the number of people who've been there over 10 years, particularly given what they do, is unbelievable. So it's lots and lots and lots of small actions that you have to choose to do, and you have to invest both time and money in. And lots of organizations are realizing a bit late that it takes more effort than they hoped.

I love it. I'm the same as you. I love that idea of a cocktail of initiatives or things they can do. Let's go back a little bit, because I think that what you describe in Moneypenny is very much around how do we create engagement in the workplace and how do we How do we create an environment that people want to work in? Which, of course, then, as we know, touches very much into culture. When we think about— I want to go back to your engineer that you spoke about earlier on, where we were sitting and soldering bits and bobs together because I was watching Jim or Sarah beside me and they were doing a great job and I was copying what they were doing. For people coming into the workplace now, and I know that you love a bit of intergenerational chat, for people coming into the workplace now, They're missing out on that. When I think back to when I started in PR, I would get a boring— I was working for Hewlett-Packard doing printers, so I would get a boring spec sheet about a printer and be expected to write a press release that really bigged up this amazing printer, which was really no different as a black and white laser printer. But I'd write a couple of pages of press release and I'd give that to my boss who would give it back to me with red pen all over it. And I would do that and I'd sit and listen and I'd watch and I'd be in press briefings and I'd just be absorbing. The sense that I get certainly from chatting to our clients and just seeing how people are working now is that that opportunity for absorption, what we may have generically called water cooler moments, or just moments of magic or moments of learning, are kind of gone. So how do we get those back, or do we ever get them back? And if we don't get them back, what do we do instead?

Of course we can get them back, but it has to be deliberate. The laziness of the water cooler moment that we're all so bored of hearing about is that it suggests nothing needs to be done other than somebody puts in a water station. And the reality is, as you've just described, that when somebody joins an organization for the first time, there is this critical moment where they either build learning, connection, understanding, or they don't. And we used to know this. We used to send people— I spoke to somebody who started their audit career in the '90s, and she said, "You won't believe it when I tell you, we went for 3 months to an offsite training center as a cohort. 3 months to learn to be auditors. And we had pens and paper. We didn't even have laptops." She described going to her first plant, to go and do an audit and she saw some machinery and she didn't know what the machinery was or whether it should appear in an audit. So she went to Boots, bought a disposable camera, took a photograph of it, then had it processed at Boots and then brought it about the office and said, "Do you know where does this fit in the audit?" Like, this is another universe. But when I ask her, "Are those people still your friends and colleagues now?" 100%. She knows them all. They're still in her professional network. Now we compare that to that post-2018 when that engineer goes back and suddenly that is missing. And again, just money puns fresh fresh in my mind because I was literally in their offices all morning yesterday talking to their staff and going and having a look at what they do. But they have a 6-month training program when you go in, and they don't hire people who've got a background in answering phones. They hire people who are the right personality, and then they do a 2-week intensive training and then ongoing training as a cohort for 6 months. So again, they're working hard to build those connections. We can do it, but just putting people onto online training and compliance training where they click a button and do a question at the end is not not doing that. And then we wonder why the engagement scores are so low across so many organizations.

Yeah, and tracking down as well. You know, really, you know, Gallup's— I think that's the lowest engagement number globally that Gallup has seen in 10 years, right? And a lot of this stuff is contributing to that.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. When we think about those learning moments, those moments of magic, or just even just even rebuilding connection. A lot of what I see and hear is, "What can the organization do for us?" from people in the organization. We look up because we're used to in hierarchical organizations to go, "Well, my boss and her boss and her boss and his boss and her boss, what will they do for me?" Whose responsibility is connection in the workplace? Where does the responsibility lie?

I think there's two different things I think about. So one of the questions that I like to ask audiences at the moment is I put a picture of a small car that goes around in a a rink at a circus that you drive. And I say, what do you call this? And half the audience shouts, Dodge 'Em! And the other half shouts, bumper car! And I say, yeah, think about those words. Are you somebody who goes into somewhere and dodges, dodges people, just gets on with your own stuff, goes around the outside, as I did when I first drove my own Dodge 'Em? Or are you somebody who gets in a bumper car and tries to engage with the world and create energy, you know, create sparks, create moments? Because if you're hiring, I would strongly suggest, if you're building a culture and you want people to show up with their full enthusiasm, their commitment, their engagement, you're looking to hire bumper cars. And Moneypenny doesn't use that language, but they talk about smiley happy people. They've got their own language for it. So I think partly this is who you hire. I think then it's about those people bringing, turning up and wanting to do a good job. And when I interview 20-somethings, which I do a lot, they want to do a good job. So partly I think it is explaining that part of what is doing a good job in this organization is getting to know people, getting involved, turning up at the paddleboard club, turning up, you know, for the party, like, you know, show up and, you know, engage engage with people. And some of the brilliance of the ideas that I was hearing about yesterday, having this birthday cupboard that people can choose your gift, your team chooses that gift. That's a little moment of connection. They have to think, Scott's birthday now, what would he like? Okay, what's he into? What's he mentioned recently? Oh, he said he was going away. Shall we get him a travel cup? You know, whatever. It's that sort of building that. And so I think it is partly hiring the right people, and then I think it is giving them the moments, creating moments where they can connect, and at the same time being really observant about the things that drive connection apart. So if you force people to compete for chairs or force them, make it really difficult for them to sit with their team every day, even though they've spent £25 on train tickets, getting into your office, then they can't sit with their team or anyone that they know. And then they go home feeling really deflated, like that is kind of on you. So I think it's a push and a pull. And I think it's also with younger generation expressly saying, this connectivity piece is important, because they don't necessarily They know that instinctively. They're not turning up and just seeing the soldering the way that we did.

Yeah. And I think that hybrid working is really not helping that either. And back to the word that you used earlier on, intentionality. I think being more intentional about what we do, when we do it, who we do it with is incredibly important because if we're asking people to come to an office 2 days a week or in some cases 5 days a week, because to your point, people like to see people sitting at desks and they don't like to see empty offices. Which for me is just the entirely wrong reason to be dragging people into an office. But when we think about being more intentional about hybrid working, what is it that organizations and leaders and employees need to be doing in order to make work work?

So I think it's, again, it's being intentional. If you say, right, the next 90 days for this team, we need to deliver this big report. So that week, we're gonna need everybody in 3 days a week. We're going to be interviewing new candidates. I'd really like everyone to meet them. So We don't want everybody here 2 days. We've got this training session and mapping, literally mapping out the days where we're going to connect and be in together, maybe putting, you know, some informal lunch and learns or some company updates or team updates in there and planning that. People are happy to go to offices on the whole if it's a pleasant environment. I mean, not university, but most people are happy to go in for a reason. And if they're going to see the right people and they can see the benefit of it. What they do not want is a mandate saying, choose 3 days, any 3 days, come in. And literally, I interview people who say, I don't want to deal with anyone, so come in "on a Monday and Friday because nobody's there, but I've ticked the box." And then other people I get, you know, leaders saying, "I've looked at the numbers, they've come in literally coffee badging. They're literally coming in, scanning the thing, going to the cafeteria, having lunch or dinner, lunch or coffee, and leaving." So we're creating rules without intention. So we need to be clear, why do we want them together? What do we want them to do? And then allowing them, if we're happy, if it works in our business model and, you know, all the other factors for us, but saying, you know, if you're at home for 2 days a week, that's great. Let's reduce the number of calls. Let's be clear what you're delivering on those days. Let's give you to do 3 hours to focus on this report, this project, whatever it is, so that it makes sense to people and they get the joy of connection, but they also get some time to do some proper work.

Yeah. And there is that piece around then the line manager who's always unfortunately the one who's probably the hardest working person in the organization, the one in the middle, getting it from above, getting it from underneath. They're the one for me that has to kind of shape what that cadence or that approach or that intentionality looks like in many ways. And then hold their people to account. So if, you know, Jimmy or Sarah are coming in on our core days in the office, and they've booked a diary full of one-to-one calls for which they're going to be sitting in a booth all day, we're not going to see them, then that's a complete waste of everyone's time and a complete waste of the opportunity for that connection among the team.

Yeah, saying, look, we're here together to do this, and this is why. So it makes sense to people. And I think sometimes we're very cautious of doing that. I think we make a lot of assumptions about what other people know or understand, which they don't necessarily see in the same way.

Yeah, yeah. And I wonder, one thing that we keep hearing is leaders don't like having what might be perceived as difficult conversations about that stuff. So how do we solve that problem?

So it's a bit of a circle, this one, because you can't have a difficult conversation with somebody you don't have a connection of trust with to start with, or it's very difficult. If you just go in raw with a conversation with somebody you hardly know going, 'This is a bit shit, to be honest,' then you've got no trust, you've got no connection. If you and I have worked together for the last 2 years and you're like, 'Christine, I just want to chat with you about something. I've got some concerns. I know you're doing a great job on this client, but actually I think there's more we can do here. I think we need to focus on this. I think we're missing something,' then that's going to be a— hopefully, if we both handle it well— a reasonable conversation. If you just appear out of nowhere and say, 'This is shit,' it's going to be a disaster. And so what I think we're finding is that people are unable to have these more difficult conversations that would have just been part of the fabric at work because they're nervous of it. But I do think there's something else going on here, which I'm hearing a huge amount about, which is sensitivity around saying the wrong thing. And I do think that I actually, in my head, have a robustness index. I'm thinking I'm gonna draw it out when I go in to see clients. And I think, how robust are the conversations that happen with this organization? And some organizations I go in and go, yeah, this is pretty feisty. Like, they will say what needs to be said. They give advice. A vibe of this is an environment where you want to turn up if you're hugely fragile. You need to be able to hear stuff. You need to be able to say stuff. Other environments I go into are terribly, terribly cautious. And it's quite difficult for leaders and managers. They say, well, I couldn't possibly give that feedback because of this, because of that. Often in public sector, it's really hard. And often in the NGO charitable sector, so much caution. We might offend somebody. This might— and that gets in the way of having important conversations sometimes.

And it's really, there's a lot of pressure on This episode is brought to you by Inspiring Change. We work with senior teams to help them be clear and intentional about the culture they need to be successful, to communicate change in a more human way, and to give their leaders the skills, tools, and confidence to be amazing catalysts for change. To learn more about our work and who we do it for, just pop along to inspiringchange.ie. I think for me that comes back to your point earlier on about the fact that what we're missing is trust and that connection and that relationship to have that conversation, which is Christine, I want to have a conversation with you and I might not choose the right words. I might use the wrong words, not because I'm disrespectful or not because I don't believe in what you believe in, but just because I'm a 53-year-old white male and all of this new stuff coming up just isn't I've just maybe not done my research or whatever it might be. But this is coming from a good place. This is where I'd like you to see this coming from. And actually, it was funny, I was only chatting to a guest on this series earlier on a couple of weeks back about neurodiversity and talking to people that were neurodiverse. And I said a lot of people, I think, to exactly that point, a lot of managers avoid the conversations because they don't know how to have the conversation, what words to use, what words not to use, how not to offend, how not to say somebody's got something when they haven't got something. I even said the word condition to Alan when we were talking about it, and he was like, I wouldn't use that word. And I'm like, oh God, it's so hard.

We know this, right? So what we see societally, if you take it out of work, is people are closer to the people they know well, their own friends and family. We spend more time with our own small networks, and we spend a lot of time online with groups that agree with us already. And we've lost that middle layer of people, you know, like your funny neighbor who's a bit of a strange person for whatever reason, but actually is a really lovely person and feeds your cat when you're on holiday or give you a lift into town when the bus doesn't turn up or whatever. And we've missed that, we've lost that connection. And when you talk to people who started their careers earlier, you know, a lot of them have really difficult bosses who said wildly inappropriate things, certainly by today's standards. But if you knew they had your best interests at heart, if they did look after you, if they fought for your pay rises, if when the client went off on one, they were always shoulder to shoulder with you going, 'Don't worry, I've got you. We can sort this out.' You could, you could let some stuff go. You could let some behaviors, some comments, some things go because at the core of it, you felt this person is genuinely on my side. Where we don't have that connection to start with, we get more sensitive, I think, to perceived insults, saying wrong. It was also a societal thing. People are more sensitive to those sorts of things. And instead of perhaps holding it lightly and saying, "Do you know what, condition might not be the right word." The old one somebody said recently, committing suicide, "We don't really, we don't want it to be seen as a crime." If you handle it like that, people go, "Oh, that's interesting." If you get really cross with them, then it shuts them down, and then it's very hard to have a conversation.

Yeah, it's that whole idea of being curious and not judgmental.

It's letting people be flawed, let people make mistakes. If— just assume two things: assume good intent, which is the best marriage advice that I ever got, assume good intent, and accept people are flawed. They will say the wrong thing. It may not be what we assume it is. Don't jump to the worst possible conclusion about what they intended.

Yeah, because it is, it is really easy to do that. And I do think that when you, when you look at lots of— just even looking on the, the dearth higgswill that is social media, says a dad of 3 teenagers. I am literally a walking cliché. There is a lot out there and I think people are just almost— we get to a point where people are like just always poised to be offended. Like I'm just waiting for you to say something that's going to offend me and pretty much everything you're going to say is going to offend me somehow. And of course it's really hard to navigate that, but I love that idea of we just assume positive intent. Is that okay? Can we start there and see where we get to? I think it's really powerful.

If I might say, assume positive intent and don't be fragile. None of us can afford to be fragile. I suppose in my job I can't be fragile, but it's not a helpful thing to be super fragile. It just makes you very porous and you're the one that gets burned. And every time you get hurt by these things and you push the fury back, the rage back, you're creating tension. You're creating stress that will come back on you. When I present stuff, I present stuff about stress, and I used to have this image. It's a bit violent, so I sort of took it out. People are kind of wince, but you kick a ball really hard at a fence and then it comes back and smacks you in the face. It's the more of that that we put out, the more that comes back. And I have a really conscious thought on social. I quite enjoy social media, and I did actually break it this week because I objected slightly to an which led to quite a funny debate. But I try not to put negative things into it. And if people say, I hate this, this is bollocks, this is rubbish, I'm like, okay, fine, whatever, fine. I try not to sort of hold a very hard line against it. I mean, I know what I believe, but I don't want to fight with people in social media. So I try and hold things gently and I try not to be too fragile.

Yeah, there is little point in getting into a social media tiff because nobody is coming out of that well at all. Let me ask you about expectations and your experience of expectations. And I think it's easy, you know, you started your career in advertising, I started my career in PR around the same time. Thursday evening, Friday evening, you're out for drinks, perhaps the odd lunchtime here and there, you might go for a drink. But of course, the world is changing. People are, they want different things, you know, going for pints on a Friday, isn't for everybody, where younger people are getting fitter and going to the gym. We've got more people coming in who are perhaps more diverse religious backgrounds, who drinking for them is like, "Oh God, really?" And if that's what we do in work, then I don't really want to be a part of that. So, when we think about connection and connecting and what needs to happen, how do we make sure that we do that through a lens of what people need as opposed to what we think they need based on the experiences that we've had? Which, as you said earlier on, we've We've probably both got lifelong friendships from those experiences of going out for a couple of pints on a Thursday or a Friday evening, ad hoc, last minute. And they're some of the best nights out we've ever had. It's not the same today. So how do we make sure we don't run the risk of judging what people need today based on a lens that we might be— a rose-tinted lens perhaps that we might be looking through?

I mean, at the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, we could ask them. I mean, and ideally let them direct it. And what suggestions have you got? Do you want to have croissants on a Thursday morning? Do you want to start up a board games club at lunchtime? Do you want to have a paddleboard club? Do you want to have a running club that goes out before work on a Friday or at lunchtime or whatever? I think the more self-directed stuff is and the more that people create it themselves, the better it tends to work anyway. In order to get that going though, you've got to have people who want to show up. So again, if you start from a standing base where nobody wants to hang out with each other because we haven't built any of those relationships, they won't want to do anything. But if you you can start to build those connections where even a couple of people say, "Do you know what? Every Wednesday we always go for a brisk walk around the park and we catch up on what's going on and everybody's welcome." You know, why not? That's zero cost, great fresh air, bit of an energizer, get people moving. So I would be encouraging the team itself to think about what they would like to do to connect.

Yeah. And as a leader then, if you stick in another one of— I know another one of your topics you love talking about, intergenerationalism.

Yeah.

If you take lots of different generations, because we have 4 or 5 different generations in the workplace right now, we've got those people in our teams. How do we make sure that we're meeting the needs of everybody?

Well, I think if you go to the team and say, what do you need? Then different people at different age groups and different groups are going to pop up with different things. But if you think about a walk on a Wednesday lunchtime, any generation can join if they want to. It doesn't exclude anybody who wants to show up. So I think it is, you know, it's having some nuance. I heard somebody speak this this week at an event that I was speaking at, and she said she'd been talking to the head of HR at Walmart, and they reckon they've got 6 generations in the workplace because they've got teenagers doing work experience who are Gen Alpha. And then because America doesn't have the same retirement laws, they literally have generations still on tills. And so I thought, gosh, that's sort of mind-blowing, isn't it? You know, you've got 15-year-olds on the tills and you've got 85-year-olds on tills. So yeah, so I thought that was great. I thought it was really a mind-blowing example. But anyway, I think it is having options. I think it's not forced. I think it's coming from within. Creating the conditions where people want to do things together. And I think the real work isn't in these one sweep of the wand things. It's in lots and lots and lots of small interactions. And lots of businesses that I would talk to would say, "That's too much time. It's too much money." And I would say, "That's fine. I get it. It is. It's a lot of those things. But the alternative is high turnover, less discretionary effort, and a lot of cost on recruitment." So, it's, you know, it's up to So, turnover, recruitment, loss of knowledge.

If organizations are getting to a place where connections are really weak, where they're not being intentional, where they're not doing the things that we've spoken about for the past 30 minutes and connection is really struggling, what else are they losing?

So, I spoke to some people recently who worked at a big financial organization, and they'd done 3 3 rounds of layoffs in the last 4 years. And they said that when the systems go down, because the senior leaders have made the decisions about this, they haven't talked to people. And what they don't realize is that, and I will put up a slide at the moment that says, you know, everyone's going about AI, but around here, we're lucky if the printers work, is that most people's tech stacks don't actually work very well, and don't talk to each other. And they said, you know what, they let go of all these people who are now, you know, been paid off, sitting in their gardens, and we have to to call them when the systems go down because they're the only people who know how to reset them. So it's mortifying because they lost their jobs and we've kept ours, and we're going, "Oh, hi Barbara, I'm so sorry to trouble you, but could you just remind me?" And so you lose joy, you make people feel not precious, and if they don't feel precious, then they don't think the work's precious and they don't think their employer's precious. So I think you lose so much, and I think it is that you know, we cut back what we can measure. I talked to a consultant who's just retired from the NHS after working the NHS for his whole career and as a specialist. He said, you know, when I started, we had a mess room and all the doctors would meet in there and discuss a complex case. A patient's come in with this and they need plastic surgery and they need, uh, his, his sort of orthodontics, so it's oral surgery, and they need this, they need all this. We'd all get together and talk about it and then we'd go. And now, and we used to have tennis courts on the, on at the hospital which are now, you know, turned into car parking and all these different, there are cafeterias and canteens and places we could meet. And we used to go out. And over the years, it's all been taken away because it's cost— the free teas and coffees, the mess room, the tennis courts. And now when you've got a complex case, you go and see someone you barely know and say this, and it's very, you know, you have to go and see them individually. It's not the same. The patient is not at the centre of it. So we've lost the very, very thing that mattered, which is the best people coming together to solve a problem as equal collaborators.

Imagine the difference that would make if a lot of that stuff was brought back, not just to the relationships that those people have in the organisation, but the knock-on impact of those relationships on patients in your NHS example there, or on customers or guests in hotels or whatever it might be. That idea that people serve people, and that's really powerful.

And also on retirement ages, because as soon as they can retire, they do and they don't— they are— they have got a good 10 years in them if they wanted to work, but they don't. And so we are losing all of that depth of experience, that knowledge, that amazing insight from people we have spent the money training, who are great at their jobs, and we've made work so unwelcoming and unrewarding and joyless that they would rather book walking holidays in Italy.

I mean, I'd rather book a walking holiday in Italy, to be honest.

But also, it'd be useful. Yeah, yeah, then great. But we're losing a lot. And, you know, yeah, you look at big corporates who are smart about this, you look at Unilever, Rolls, they're all thinking 'Okay, we've got these great, you know, expertise that are hard to hire. Why don't we have people who do 2 days a week, who do 3 months a year, who mentor people, that keep them in the business and organization in some way, you know, do 2 weeks of training a year, have them come back,' you know, whatever it is that makes sense. Like, why wouldn't we want to keep those skills and that energy? And also, when you speak to retirees, they often say, 'I feel like I've lost part of my identity. I feel like I've lost insight. I'm not keeping up to date with things.' So it seems to me there's a is a socially beneficial solution to this. But we can't make work utterly joyless and deliver it.

Listen, we've nearly come to time. So, one last question. And we talked about this earlier on. This takes time. This takes money. I don't have the time. I might have the money, but I'm not willing to spend it on this stuff because I don't believe it's that important. What would you say to somebody listening to this podcast, and they're seeing their organization, and they are seeing connection, connection fracturing, but they've only got money or time to do one thing. What would that one thing be? What's the most important place that an organization could start when it comes to trying to rebuild a sense of connection between them and their people?

Well, you know what I'm going to say, Scott, because you've seen me do it in the room, but I would say you have to start listening to each other. Create time. Let people download what's on their mind. Ask them questions. Wait for the answer, respond, think about it. And just, I feel that that core basic skill of just letting people finish sentences is so lost in a world of ping, ping, ping, ping, ping. And when I do it in the room, as you know, I get people to listen to somebody else without interrupting for 3 minutes. And I cannot tell you the magical transformation that happens in rooms. People say, I haven't— I didn't know I thought those things. Nobody's let me finish a sentence for years. I feel strongly connected to the person I've just talked to. People hold hands, they I think you did when you did it.

We hugged, yeah.

Yeah, you hug somebody you've never met before. It's the most magical thing. It costs absolutely nothing. It takes 3 minutes each way. You could do it for 2 minutes, doesn't matter, 5 minutes, doesn't matter. It's a really short amount of time. And at the end of it, I say, "Now give someone a compliment, appreciate something about them." And the whole room goes crazy with energy, all these people. And I laugh about it and I say, "You know that I just forced them to be nice to you?" Because we forget, we forget to listen. And we forget to say nice things to each other. And if you only start there, you'll be in a better place.

Great place to finish. Christine, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on. I loved your keynote. I loved the conversation today. Listeners, if you want to get in touch with Christine, you can pop along to LinkedIn. You will find her at @thechristinearmstrong, not any Christine Armstrong, the Christine Armstrong on LinkedIn, or armstrongpartners.co.uk. If you want to pop along and have a look at our website, there's loads of really good videos on there. Her vlog is really, really good. Christine, thank you so much for being on the pod today. Really appreciate you taking the time.

Pleasure. Thanks, Scott.

Thanks for listening. If you haven't already done so, please take 30 seconds to give us a quick rating and a review wherever you're listening. It really does help. And to hear from other leaders in our podcasts, to read our blogs, or to find out more about the work that we do, please visit inspiringchange.ie.