Alyssa Birnbaum

To say I was overeager to perform is an understatement. I was grinding. I worked around the clock. I spent hours finessing my PowerPoints, took meticulous meeting notes and never missed a deadline. Which is why I felt completely blindsided when I actually received my review. My boss sat me down and told me that I needed to work on connecting better with my clients and building relationships with them. Apparently,

Nobody knew anything about me. Building relationships with my clients, that's what they cared about? I couldn't understand when I was working so hard to deliver quality work.

I wish I could say I underwent some immediate transformation where I became some fabulous connector and lived happily ever after. But in truth, I didn't really know what to do and I fumbled for a few more years. My clients were remote most of the time. I wasn't working with them and I didn't know how to relate to them because they were so much younger than me. It was years later that I was pursuing my PhD and, like the old saying goes, research.

is me-search. And my initial me-search focused on burnout and work engagement because I knew what it was like to experience burnout.

Se, mikä oli yllättävää minulle, oli se, että olin aina ajatellut, että pysyvyys oli vain tulokseni siitä, että minulla oli liian paljon työtä. Ja että minulla tuntui, että olin todella pysyvällä liian paljon työtä, mutta oikeastaan siinä on niin monta muuta asiaa, jotka voivat osallistua. Ja tärkein asia oli yhteistyö ja liikkuvuus. Ihmiset voivat olla pysyviä, koska he tuntevat, että he eivät ole arvokkaita, eivät ole yksilöitä ja he eivät ole yksilöitä.

This stood out to me. I had always focused on work output and things that would produce actual revenue and quality work for a company. And this was conditioned by my years of schooling, where I was rewarded with good grades because I put in the effort and I worked hard. But in truth, work is full of real flesh and bone people.

who want to feel connected, and they do their best work when they feel like they're fully engaged, like their work truly matters, and like they're doing something bigger than just themselves. When the pandemic struck, as we all know, offices around the globe closed, and my colleagues and I started studying this transition into remote work, remote work-life balance, what it was like being in this new space.

Tällä hetkellä aloitin todella nähdä yhteydenmukaisuuden ja yllättäminen. Se oli enemmän kuin haastattelua, että olisi syötyä tai tyhjentää lastenhuoltoa. Isolaatio tuli syvältä. Ihmiset menivät keskustelevien keskusteluihin, kun he kävelivät kouluun.

Se, mikä oli mielenkiintoista, oli se, että tutkimuksen syntyminen näyttää, että yllätys oli syntynyt jo jo ennen pandemian aikaa. Yhdysvaltojen perusteella lähes 50 % yhdysvaltojen vanhemmista kokeilui yllätysä ennen pandemian aikaa.

and that number continues to rise. So at this point my research shifted, as I began to wonder about the effects of connections, especially in the context of work, and how that impacted people in remote interactions, if it stifled the way people were able to connect.

For my dissertation, I focused on research initially spearheaded by Dr. Jane Dutton on high quality connections at work. To understand high quality connections, I want you to think back on the last time you had a positive connection with someone. It doesn't matter how long it was. It could have been a friend, colleague, someone you met for the first time. But you felt more open with them. You felt like you truly cared.

You felt mutually connected. And when you left, you felt a little more energized and uplifted. And it didn't necessarily need to be a happy experience. It could have been about something difficult and raw. But you felt more bound together. That's a high quality connection.

I was curious about whether having higher quality connections throughout the day led to higher levels of engagement at the end of the day. What I found was fascinating. Yes, it did lead to higher levels of engagement, but it didn't matter how many interactions you had or how long you spent in those interactions. If you spent your entire day having high quality interactions with different people or just one high quality connection with one person,

you still tended to feel more engaged. I was also curious about the way that people were interacting. I wanted to know if you needed to be in person, face to face, in order to have these deep, meaningful connections, because previous researchers suggest that you do need to be in person in order to have those deep connections. So I asked people how they interacted. Were you in person and face to face? Were you videoconferencing with the camera on?

Or were you chatting through audio? Audio could be a phone call, videoconferencing with the camera off. What I found was that there was no difference between in-person connections and videoconferencing with the camera on. In other words, if we're chatting face to face, or if we're chatting through videoconference and we can see each other, we're able to connect in a similar way. Only audio interactions produce lower quality connections.

Ja kolmas asia, joka oli yllättävän yllättävää ja jota en edes halunnut. Mutta viimeinen asia, jonka löysin, oli burn-outin vaikutuksen. Burn-outtujen ihmisille oli todella vaikeaa ymmärtää, olivatko he edes voineet liittyä hyödyntäväksi yhteyksiin. Ja se on oikeastaan tärkeää, koska burn-outtujen ihmisille tuntuu vahvistumaan, jolloin kun on yhteyksiä, täytyy laittaa tuon vaikutuksen.

So burnt out individuals had a hard time even making those high quality connections. So my research showed that having high quality connections is very important for engagement. A recent study from McKinseyandLeanIn.org found that about 60% of in-person workers, employees, tended to experience connectivity compared to fewer than 20% of remote and hybrid workers.

So how do we build these connections in a remote environment or at all? So here's the advice I would have given 22-year-old me who was fumbling to make connections.

Number one is expand, or aiming for more expansive dialogue. It helps you go beyond these polite greetings and helps you dig a bit more beneath the surface. There are two ways that you can do this. One is to ask expansive, open-ended questions, and the other is to answer questions expansively. Asking expansive, open-ended questions encourages the other person to open up and share a bit more about themselves.

Think about this as if you're talking to a child coming home from school. If you ask them, how was your day? The response will probably be... Fine, yeah, sure. If you ask them what was the most exciting thing, or fun thing, or boring thing about your day, you're more likely to get a better answer. So in a similar way, when you ask your colleague