Workplace friendships: Why they're so important

[00:00:00] So, do you have a friend at work? Does your organization do anything intentional to promote friendships at work? It turns out that friendship at work has always been important and we knew that but now it's maybe even more important than ever. So a discussion of what to do is coming up now.

[00:00:22] Hi there, I'm Andrea Adams. This is The HR Hub and on the show we talk about anything related to HR. Please subscribe to the show or to the podcast. Keep moving from my fantastic guests. So today my guest is again Ryan Jenkins. Ryan's a Wall Street Journal bestselling author of a book called Connectable. He's written other books as well. He's an internationally recognized public speaker on workplace connection.

[00:00:48] He spent a decade helping organizations understand why employees feel disconnected and what they should be doing about it and why. Hello Ryan, how are you? I'm doing great. How are you? I'm good. I'm good. And that was the greeting kind of hi, how are you? Yes, the very formal top of a podcast.

[00:01:11] That's a wonderful answer. But that's relevant to the last discussion we had. This episode about friendship though, why do we need friends at work? And why is it, why do we need them more than perhaps we have in the past?

[00:01:29] Yeah. Let me start with a story. I think this is, this will strike a chord with many. You know, in the not too distant past anywhere on planet Earth, if it was a Friday and if it was a payday, inside of a bank was a party, right? Any community bank around the world, people had their paycheck in hand. They were, they were connecting with their fellow community members and the workers at the bank.

[00:01:54] And it was a, it was a real moment of connection in those communities until the ATM showed up and just crashed the connection party, right? As soon as the ATM, the automated teller machine came out, people no longer went inside the bank to cash their check. They started just using the ATM and all that connection that once occurred inside the bank just disappeared.

[00:02:15] And what's happened then and what's happening at breakneck speed in all of our lives, whether it's personal or professional is this, is that we are consistently choosing convenience over connection. All the time. We are choosing convenience over connection. It's human nature. We, we choose the convenient path and what gets sacrificed is connection, right?

[00:02:37] It's more convenient to order food to your home rather than rounding up some friends and going out to dinner or working out at home versus going to a gym or it's more convenient to remote work than to go into work. Or it's more convenient to figure out the answer using chat GPT than tapping your, your co-worker on the shoulder to ask them. And so this isn't a bad thing. I'm not saying we shouldn't be leaning in to not leaning into technology and convenient paths.

[00:03:04] But we need to understand that now more than ever, this convenience is just wreaking havoc on our connections. And so now more than ever, we're turning towards work to find more connection. And so we've got to find ways in which to deliver that. That one hurt a little bit. I have to say connection. I have said for so long that if I have to get in my car to do it, I don't do it. There you go. Yeah. Like not as me prioritizing convenience over connection.

[00:03:33] Out. Okay. Why should HR be advocating for creating opportunities for connection at work? Why should we, why should we be bearing the flag? Yeah. Let me, let me give another quick story because I'm a, I'm a keynote speaker and I basically just talk in stories for most of my professional life.

[00:03:58] Um, so recently they did some, they, they, they found these two communities in, um, the southeastern part of Brazil. So there was a lake village that was barely surviving, right? It was in shambles. People were distrusting each other. They were, they were, they were angry towards each other. Just not a great community. But then just 40 miles down the road was a community that was on the ocean. And this community was thriving. People were trusting each other.

[00:04:27] Um, it was, everything was going really well. And they were trying to figure out these on paper. These two communities are the exact same, but there's something, something that's causing one to be thriving and one to, to, to be barely surviving. And they, they were studying like the nutrients in the fish that they were pulling out of these, these different water sources. They were trying to figure out the air that they were, they, they were studying everything and they couldn't figure it out until one day they finally found the answer.

[00:04:55] The X factor, the X factor, the differentiator that was causing, um, the change between these two communities. And all your listeners are trying to think, oh, I bet it was this, maybe it was that. And usually if I'm in a live audience, I'll ask them and no one ever gets it. I'll even show the pictures and everyone still doesn't, they miss it. And it was the size of the boats, the size of the boats.

[00:05:19] So in the lake community, because the water was calm, they could get in one person boats and they would buzz around, uh, the lakes and they began becoming territorial and very competitive with one another. But then on the ocean, because the ocean was so vast and had harsh conditions, they needed a large boat that required a team to connect and work together.

[00:05:42] So ultimately it's the way we work that really infuses so much goodness and thriving into our communities. And we discount this often. And many of you can kind of make the, the, the, the leap here that we are. So many of our organizations are structured like a lake village right now where we're all just doing, you know, work feels like a solo sport now, right? Being a part of a team feels like a solo act. We do our work, we submit it and we think did it. I'm good.

[00:06:08] And we're missing out what makes, what, what improves our health by so much and what improves the, uh, the satisfaction at work, our engagement, uh, the performance of the team and organization is being on that big boat, doing important work, working together. So hopefully that answers your question as to why it's so important that we focus at connection at work. Cause from that, everything flows. Yeah.

[00:06:32] Um, from a more maybe academic standard, uh, our perspective Gallup has had, do you have a best friend at work in their 12 factors of engagement for ever? We've known about it. We don't control people's friendships at work, but how can we set the groundwork for that to happen? And you're right. Gallup has that. And we, we talked to so many of our clients hate that question in the Gallup survey, right?

[00:07:00] They're like, if I could remove one, I would remove that one. Cause no one knows how to interpret it. People don't quite know what a friend is, not let alone a best friend. And oh my gosh, I don't, I don't have a best friend at work. Frankly. And as you can imagine, as you can imagine so many people rallied against, uh, Gallup and they said, you need to remove that question. And Gallup refuses because it is one of the strongest indicators of engagement at work is if we just have one other connection at work, just one other connection.

[00:07:28] The biggest thing, and in our research, it was very clear. The number one inhibitor to connection at work is busyness. It's busyness is that we're so consumed with getting everything done. Everything is surface level. And we assume that everyone else is busy and we just get in this state of hurriedness and we miss on all these little small opportunities to connect with one another. So I'm not proposing that you need to be friends with everyone at work.

[00:07:55] That would just gum everything up and we couldn't be effective, but boy, oh boy, we can take small, we can make small tweaks in order to draw closer to each other in order to, to, to, to make it to where we want. We want to run to work in the morning and we want to be there because this is where we spend most of our waking hours. And by golly, wouldn't it be great if we had really strong connections with many people that we work with? Yeah. Okay. So what are those tweaks? I mean, HR can, can, can facilitate systemic changes.

[00:08:23] Uh, we don't control if people are actually going to become friends, but we can make little changes. Um, and so if we are going to make changes in the organization, how do we create friendship at scale or the possibility for friendship? Yeah, it's really tough. I'll give you one, um, really simple, um, tweak to make. And then I'm going to give you, um, a tool, a tool that we've built that actually does this very thing you're talking about to scale connection in a meaningful way.

[00:08:54] One of the, the simple tool first is this, um, so often we get connect, we think we're connected, but we're not. We're in this connection illusion. And what's happening is there's a big difference between communication and connection. Those two things are not the same thing. Communication is the exchanging of information and we process this in the front part of our brain, whereas connection is a feeling of understanding and a, and the ease of communication between people. And we actually process this in the back part of our brain.

[00:09:24] So a good way to think about it is if you've ever texted, I love you to a significant other, that's only communication. It's good. It's a great pro social behavior, but it's only communication. It doesn't become connection until that individual hears the tone of your voice. The tone of our voice is one of the strongest connecting, connecting features you and I have as humans. Um, they move it from communication to connection.

[00:09:48] If they feel, uh, your, uh, um, you know, a hug that you might give that person or they see your body language, that's when they're, they can click it from communication to connection. So what we need to do at work is trade communication for connection. So that means we might trade, um, a text message for a phone call. We might trade a virtual meeting for an in-person meeting. Maybe trade a statement for a question. These are all small trade-offs that we can make.

[00:10:17] And I gave this a strategy, uh, in the previous session where in, in meetings, typically what we do is we just communicate, right? We're delegating, we're informing, but we're not connecting. Um, so we have to build in connection intentionally. And so we, uh, recommend a practice called Connect Five where you take five minutes at the top of the meeting. And it's important to put it at the top of the meeting, not the back, because busyness will bulldoze connection out of your meeting. So you've got to prioritize it. And that's where HR can help.

[00:10:45] Um, prioritize it where five minutes, one person shares one non-work-related picture for just five minutes. That's it. And what we consistently hear from teams that practice this is I can finally see the human behind the job, right? We're so busy. We look at people as, as just, um, as just tactical, you know, things tasked to check off, right? But we're rarely seeing the human behind the job.

[00:11:10] So trade communication for connection, consider Connect Five or a practice like that to get there. And then the, the, the scalable solution we've built, cause we, we've heard this from so many folks and, and, and it just feels so daunting. Like, how do I create meaningful connections? How can I scale it? How can I kind of shorten the timeline that it takes to move someone from an acquaintance to a friend? Um, and it's a tool that we called Rivet. So it's, I think of like a mechanism that connects two things to make them stronger. It's exactly what our tool does.

[00:11:39] So folks will take a five minute psychology based assessment, and then we can match folks who are scientifically proven to develop a strong connection. And so companies like Netflix are using it for onboarding because you're highly isolating when you're joining an organization. So they, and we can connect with someone inside the organization and they can build that connection in a much faster way. I have to ask, how do you know scientifically if two people are going to have a, can create a good connection?

[00:12:07] Yeah, we use Hexaco, which is the most scientifically accepted personality model. And so we measure five things on that connection model. So about 80% of the assessment questions are geared towards that. And then 20% are geared towards interest. So there's a small amount of interest that we leverage to match folks, but it's based on your, on your personality.

[00:12:31] So we have 98% of the over 12,000 folks that we've matched on our tool say that they would, they want, they're extremely likely to meet their match again. So we, we've proven this thing and folks get together. In fact, I was doing an event recently. There was 900 leaders in the room and they all did rivet. And we got everyone connected and there's 900 people in the room. These two individuals sat right next to each other at this event and they've never met each other.

[00:12:55] And they, they hit it off, come to find out they were rivet matches and they've become best friends. And they're constantly emailing our team saying, this is what we're doing now. Thank you so much for putting us in touch. And, and this happens all the time, right? Whether we're at a, at an internal conference or we're at a large industry conference, we meet people, but often we don't have the permission to go deeper.

[00:13:18] We don't have the science to say, yes, you should continue interacting with this person because y'all, you two are highly professionally compatible. And so we're just thrilled to be able to play in a space and to finally make this a reality using technology to kind of use high tech to create high touch. What are, what are, what are you, what do you evaluate in this testing?

[00:13:40] So we're testing for honesty and humility, emotionality, extroversion, agreeableness is the A, C is consciousness, excuse me, conscientiousness. And then the last one around O is openness to experience. And so we've, we've partnered with other chief scientific officers from other matching sites that were for, you know, previously romantic matching.

[00:14:08] So this is the first platform that actually does it from a professional perspective. And we're using these really acute metrics to make it something that's really useful. Do you much like to like in that or is it like opposite the track kind of thing? There's a little bit of both. And, you know, there's a lot of other factors, which is proprietary. So I can't get into too much, but like, you know, your, your career stage, you know, and your age has a small percentage of, of how you might connect with someone. So there's a, there's a little bit of mix of, of all of those things.

[00:14:38] But it's not strictly based off of where the exact person. So there's, there's 12 connection personas. So if you take the assessment, you get a connection persona, you get to learn more about how you connect with others. So there's a great self-awareness to this aspect as well. But nine times out of 10, they're different personas that are actually getting matched. So what are your thoughts about remote work? Is it part of the, like, should we just put an end to it? I don't, like, personally, I don't think that's realistic.

[00:15:07] So if we're going to continue with it, what is your advice for building connection to normal work? But first, I really do want to hear your thought take on remote work. You know, it kind of comes back to how we kicked off this conversation, right? We choose convenience over connection. So remote work is a really good example of this, where it's way more convenient to lean in towards remote work than to go into an office. There's a ton of benefits for being in a remote setting.

[00:15:37] And for most of my consulting and speaking, I'm never encouraging folks one way or the other, because every organization is so unique. There's a lot of different models that work well. We just need to be focused on connection. And you can still connect in this digital world. You just got to be mindful of it. And one of those big distinctions is real time, real time, right? So a phone call is going to be much more connection enriching versus Slack or texting, right?

[00:16:06] Whenever we can put ourselves in real time scenarios, we have better our odds for connecting. But here's how I would look at it kind of at a more macro level. So psychologists tell us that you and I, as humans, we have three psychological nutrients. Number one is competence. We want this feeling that we're capable. Number two is autonomy. We want to feel like we have control. And then number three is connection. We want to experience belonging. So these are our three psychological nutrients.

[00:16:36] And what's happening is we're over-indexing on autonomy, right? The pandemic gave many of us a ton of autonomy. And now we have a lot of questions about, well, should I go back in the office? Should I spend more time with my team? And we're starting to have to let go of that autonomy. And the question I think all of us should be asking ourselves in a very honest way is this. How often is our connection nutrient deficient because of autonomy? I'll say that one more time.

[00:17:04] How often is your connection nutrient deficient because of autonomy? And we have to be honest, right? Are we loving just how easy our life is because of remote work? Well, you know, the best friendships you have weren't easy. It takes work. And so if we want more connection, which as we've talked about previously, is our most significant need, we've got to put in the work. So I kind of preface that and I'll state one more other thing as it relates to remote work.

[00:17:33] The research we put in our book centered around social media. And we looked at the pros and cons of social media. So the pros of social media is that when it's, excuse me, it's supplementing. So it's a pro when social media is supplementing your in-person relationships. Social media becomes a detriment when it's substituting for real, real life interaction and relationships.

[00:18:02] So the same can be true when it comes to remote work is that remote work can be really effective if it's supplementing existing relationships. So if we want to build strong teams, I always encourage folks to think about in person. And we've highlighted one of the companies in our book called Automatic, which is the company that built WordPress, which, you know, I think over half the Internet is based off of that product.

[00:18:31] And they have a thousand person, fully distributed organization. Employees are all around the world. But for one week every year, they bring everyone together in a location and they just focus on culture and connection. And so for that organization, that one week serves as building the connection. And then they can use remote work to supplement that connection. So I think that's a really effective way to be thinking about remote work.

[00:19:01] And some of you might think, hey, you know, I've got plenty of relationships outside of work. You know, work is I just need to do the remote thing. That's fine. But for organizations and the HR professionals that are serious about building healthy connection inside their organizations, we've got to be thinking about doing more of these in person or other kind of more orchestrated, intentional virtual events to cement connection and then use digital tools to supplement.

[00:19:29] I think people say, I've got enough connection outside of work. I don't need connection at work. But work needs you to have connection at work. Partly you are paid to have connection at work so that there is team, so that there is, you know, because Gallup and everything else proves the value of it. So I think, you know, you're obliged to.

[00:19:55] You see, you've said you have a model to help organizations help people build connection. Tell me about that model. Yeah, the model is called the team connection model. And the idea here, I like to use the analogy of a brick wall. So a brick wall that doesn't have any mortar, right? That just bricks are stacked on top of each other. It might look like a sturdy wall. But if you put pressure on it, it's going to crumble because there's no mortar.

[00:20:25] There's nothing connecting those bricks versus a wall that has mortar. That's what we're talking about here today. So oftentimes it looks like our team is performing well. Everyone's behaving nicely. They all know their job responsibilities. But as soon as pressure comes, as soon as transition or they're asking to pivot, it's going to crumble. And so what we need to do is build the mortar. We need to put cement in between our team members in order to make us resilient.

[00:20:50] And so I'm constantly having folks think differently from team building to team binding. So the building is just assembly. It's occasional. Its strength is assumed. And then team binding is all about strengthening and its strength is assured and it's continuous. And so this idea of creating team binding is all about how do we have intentional behaviors that we can do in order to actually create more connection across our team members.

[00:21:19] So we talked about Rivet helping one-on-one connections and that's kind of like a CRM for teams where we can actually use this team relationship management. It's kind of what I like to think about Rivet as and to where we can see kind of the connection health of our teams. But then the playbook is this model. And so there's three steps. It's circular because connection is always occurring, right? We don't just connect once with someone and that's it. We have to constantly connect and reconnect. And so the three steps are really simple. Number one, it's C.

[00:21:49] Do we know each other? And then as an individual, do I feel seen on the team? Number two is sync. Do I am I moving in the same direction as my team? And do I feel in sync as an individual? And third and final is support. Are we showing up for each other? And do I feel supported? So those are the three elements we have to have in order to feel like our team is binding and it's not just that brick wall without mortar. So I'm happy to go into any one of those.

[00:22:17] I think the sync is probably the one that's most abstract to folks. So if we're just going to pick one, I would suggest that one. Yeah. Because in the last one, we talked a little bit about scene because I was curious about that. And you talked about really looking at people at the eyes and asking them, you know, with intention how their day is going. But sync. Yeah. Like, what is that? Yeah. I think the good analogy to think about here is I'm sure this many can relate. I find myself in a lot of airports.

[00:22:46] I live in Atlanta, home of the busiest airport in the world. And so I'm constantly walking in the terminal. And when I'm walking and then if I get unlucky one day and someone comes in front of me from the bathroom and they're walking at a completely different pace than everyone else walking down the terminal. All of a sudden I have to slow my walk to like 50 percent slower than what I was at. It's really frustrating.

[00:23:11] And I'm sure many of your listeners can relate where you get stuck behind someone that's a slow walker in the grocery store on the side of the street. Right. It's infuriating. But here's what's happening inside your brain. It's fascinating. So it's a it's a it's a inside your brain. It's called movement synchronization disruption. And so what's happening is your brain is telling you that you are out of sync with the other group. So in the airport there I am. Other people are moving ahead and I have slowed down.

[00:23:39] So my brain starts to panic because it's going, oh, no, all these other people are going ahead of me to get the resources, the food and water. My hunter gather brain is still fully enacted. All of us. It's true for all of us. And so your brain is panicking, thinking, oh, no, I'm out of sync. I'm going to miss out. I'm going to potentially die because I'm not in sync with everyone else around me. And so that's literally what your brain is thinking. If I'm out of sync, I'm out of life. I'm out of I'm out of luck. Yeah.

[00:24:07] And so this happens unintentionally all the time throughout the workday. If we feel like we're out of sync, all of a sudden we feel detached. We feel like, am I the only one? And your brain starts to focus just on that. And no longer are we feeling like we're moving consistently together. So synchronization is a really big deal. And one of our clients is the Home Depot. And we've worked really hard with them to actually find ways in order to get in sync.

[00:24:32] And so we've built their onboarding process to where there's a lot of personal sharing, where they get to know each other really well. Then they're in sync on the values and the surroundings. So we built a scavenger hunt for their team so they can actually go on scavenger hunts in their corporate office to figure out where are things? How can I leverage this facility? So they're getting in sync with their surroundings and their teammates and the values of the organization. So that's a really important aspect in order to feel connected. It's a little bit abstract.

[00:25:00] But once we kind of, you know, communicate it in these terms, I think it really resonates with books. Yeah. I think when I talk about the systemic impact that HR can have, onboarding is so important. So important. And those are really creative ideas. I like this scavenger hunt idea. I love that. Fun. Okay. We're at the end of this. Where can someone find you and learn more about friendship and work? You have to go to ryanjenkins.com.

[00:25:29] That's the mothership. I have a lot of blog resources. I write for Psychology Today and Entrepreneurs. There's a lot of articles that I post there as well. So ryanjenkins.com. And if you want to get your hands on how to implement these tools in a very specific way with your organization, again, it's great for HR professionals. You go to connectionvault.com. You can download all these resources for free. And thanks for tuning in, everybody, and appreciate the conversation. Thank you. I appreciate the conversation, too. Well, thanks, Ryan.

[00:25:58] I loved that. I'm feeling a little uncomfortable right now because that idea of convenience over connection is hitting a little too close to home. So we're going to be thinking about that. And I'm going to challenge you out there. If that's happening for you, do something about it. I'm going to do something about it. Ryan and I did an episode that's really a companion to this, which was about loneliness and connection at work.

[00:26:28] Check that out. The link's either on my list of episodes or inside of the screen. Thanks for watching out there, and we'll see you next time.