Connectable: How Leaders Can Move Teams from Isolation to All • By Ryan Jenkins and Steve Van Cohen • McGraw Hill Education • 256 pages • ISBN 9781264277506 • $28 / £21.99
McGraw Hill Education
If you’ve ever experienced the stress and isolation of working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, only to return to the office and still feel disconnected, you may not feel like you need anecdotes and Statistics on how lonely other people are.
But there’s a lot of value in being reminded that you’re not the only one who has to learn how to build social relationships in a new way and during traumatic times. And if you’re a manager, you should be concerned about whether or not your team feels lonely – if only because employee collaboration, engagement, productivity, and loyalty suffer. surname.
Authors Steven Van Cohen and Ryan Jenkins report that 72% of workers around the world feel lonely at least once a month, while 94% of leaders say their employees are getting lonelier and lonelier. when they work remotely. It’s a matter of not being remotely controlled, Can connect is quick to point out: “Remote workers who feel connected to their work and their teams are less likely to feel lonely than those who work in offices surrounded by people but lack the connections.” quality”. It is possible to connect also not online: but “ready and ready to be connected”.
Also: Hybrid workers don’t want to return to the office. But soon, they may have to
Loneliness in the workplace is the feeling that you don’t have a good relationship with your coworkers, your leader, the organization you work for, or the work you do, not whether there are other people in the room. Isolation can be either welcome solitude or unwelcome solitude, depending on whether you feel you have the necessary trust, closeness, and affection.
General notions that blame ATMs, Siri, Netflix, supermarket self-service payments, and YouTube video tutorials for stripping our social connections don’t feel particularly helpful. Nor does a phrase like “technology play a sinister role in eroding human bonds” to describe “looking at your phone instead of the TV show you’re watching.” watch with his wife”. However, the authors sometimes keep that in mind and note that loneliness in the workplace has a long history.
Similarly, pointing out the disconnect between Gen Z employees who want regular feedback and live chat with their managers and managers told Gen Z wants to do everything with instant messaging , can really help both managers and lonely employees.
Belonging requires psychological security, as well as feeling that what you do is important. A short but very important part of Can connect shows the difference between being lonely because you’re in a new town with a different culture and you haven’t connected yet, and what the authors call ‘different’ loneliness, where you don’t have equal opportunity, respect or experience as a colleague, and ‘intentional’ loneliness, resulting from discrimination, harassment or intentional exclusion. Oddly enough, they always seem to view social relationships in the workplace as a good thing, not to mention how to handle unwanted or downright intimidating approaches.
Can connect is a strange combination of useful insight and popular psychology. “Busyness, distraction, hostility, immaturity, ignorance, efficiency, fear, selfishness, and remote working can all contribute to distance between people,” the authors wrote. notes and goes on to suggest that, “too much screen time … cannot replace the link-building and belonging-promoting effects of face-to-face contact”. That doesn’t seem appropriate clear message from staff that they expect flexible, hybrid activity to be part of their future – and even suggestions from the book itself, like “add emojis to your next message” or “look at photos on your phone from a month or a year ago until you find one with a friend and send it to them”.
The second half of the book offers tips for leaders on how to notice and change the things that isolate people on their team. Given the little training many managers get in real management, the section on recognizing loneliness and techniques to help people make and stay connected, is valuable.
Seeing this called the proprietary “Four-Step Loneliness Framework” reminds you that the authors run a company that works with organizations like Salesforce and Coca-Cola to provide ‘healthy’ advice. for workers’. But if you can ignore the nasty stereotype of technology (or interpret it as a poor criticism of how technology can be abused), you’ll find ways to help employees and colleagues feel more engaged – in the office or remotely.
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