According to our most recent guest, Charmaine Hammond, personal connection is critical to not only mental health but also the overall health of a business. Charmaine talks about the challenges of keeping teams connected in an ever-changing work world. No matter if your team members have gone back to the office or are working from home, today’s episode provides best practices for meaningful workplace connection.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Charmaine Hammond is a renowned speaker, author, educator, and mental health advocate. Her passion for workplace trust, connection, culture, and collaboration is evident in everything she does, including her recent film production, Back Home Again.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
THE PROBLEM
There’s no question that workplace connection impacts mental health and culture. Over the past couple of years, guest Charmaine Hammond says that many “leaders and HR professionals have seen not only disconnection among their teams, but also conflict bubbling up.” So, what’s causing these issues in the workplace? According to Charmaine, people are navigating frequent change and uncertainty, which creates “assumption and judgment that are leading to increased conflict.”
With the rise of remote work, teams are missing what they’re calling impromptu or informal connection in the workplace. “You’re walking down to the boardroom. You grab a coffee, and then you pop your head in somebody’s office door. That two-minute chit-chat is really tough to replicate because it takes a lot of effort. You have to actually set a meeting with somebody and then virtually ‘show up.’”
This connection — connection that happens on a very informal basis — is critical to workplace culture and team elements like building trust and maintaining relationships.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Keeping the Camera On
“I love that you mentioned keeping the camera. I’m seeing that a lot of leaders and human resource professionals are starting to require that because it’s hard to engage as a team. And when you’re looking at just the names and the black squares on the screen, then also there are a lot of assumptions and miscommunications that are happening. People aren’t showing up fully present.”
Screen Fatigue
“There’s a tendency for people to start questioning, ‘Does this need to be a virtual meeting, like a Zoom or Microsoft Teams meeting, or is this a meeting that should’ve just been a 10-minute phone call?’ We’re seeing people starting to get screen fatigue, meeting fatigue. People are saying that they’re literally racing from one Zoom room to another consistently showing up one minute late and not really connecting in the same way. Even though we’re connected virtually through all these different platforms and tools that help us, many are saying the quality of the connection is not as meaningful.”
Finding Quality Connection
“A lot of organizations are turning off the chat for all or part of the meeting. And this is happening because sometimes people think they’re writing something to private-message somebody, but they’ve sent it to everyone. If you were all in the same room together while a discussion was happening and somebody was speaking, would you actually lean over to your neighbor and start a sidebar conversation? Of course not. So then why are you doing it in the virtual platform? So as we turn off the chat, the quality of conversation is more transparent or more focused on the people in the room.”
Pandemic Hires
“I had a conversation recently with a leader who hired a number of people during the pandemic. These individuals have not met face to face, and they’re actually feeling — in the employees’ words — left out. […] And when they went into the virtual workspace, working from home, the leader still said that coffee breaks needed to happen. She said, ‘In that fifteen minutes, have coffee with one of your colleagues.’ This has been exceptional for that team. I’ve seen other teams follow similar suits and it’s allowing for that deeper relationship between colleagues.”
Rules and Structure
“There’s typically some kind of meeting norms or meeting courtesies or rules of engagement around how people show up at meetings. Otherwise, it feels like a free-for-all, and nobody knows how to show up. And so often the meetings are complete dysfunction. It’s important to create structure, create that sense of flow within meetings, making sure that there are some meeting hurdles around how people raise their questions.”
The Importance of the Recap
“In the more virtual/hybrid world right now, the teams that are functioning really well are using what I call cascading messages. We probably all use these. We just may not have a name for it. This is where you might present information or an important decision or change at a meeting. I mean, we zone out of communication all the time, so somebody could literally miss the message even if they were there on the Zoom screen. So they’ve now said it at the meeting, but there’s that recap at the end of the meeting. And then they might follow up with a quick meeting summary and at the next meeting, anything important is revisited.”
LEARN MORE
Find Charmain Hammond on LinkedIn or check out her website here. And if you’re interested in checking out an inspiring movie about mental health co-produced by Charmaine, find out more about it at backhomeagainmovie.com.