Designing for Connection in the Workplace
Where and why and how and when should we meet our colleagues now?
If you want people back, you gotta make it good.
The mid-pandemic return to office life has been messy and a little awkward. One person recently wrote to me about her husband (whose accounting firm tripled in size during the pandemic) as he tried to navigate all the new faces as a senior partner: "He’s been trying to make an effort but introducing yourself to dozens of people is impractical. So he’s reduced to 'Hi.'" A friend was excited to return to her nonprofit to be with colleagues again only to find her boss perpetually on Zoom calls with her door closed, "which sort of defeats the purpose of being back in the office." I know of a board meeting, where, in trying to include three virtual directors, twelve members sat in a boardroom and individually Zoomed in. "It was an incredibly frustrating experience. In trying to be digitally inclusive, we didn't benefit from the actual power of an in-person meeting," one member told me.
Whether your team is in-person, remote, or hybrid, one thing is true in any form: Connection doesn't happen on its own. You need to design for it.
Before Covid, the hardware of office life (hallways, elevators, doorways, salad lines) facilitated connection and interaction. (Though clearly, some of these patterns were already not working for many.) Then suddenly overnight, we didn’t have any of that hardware. And, one virtual meeting at a time, we had to practice the software of connection. Now, as many are re-entering physical workplaces at least some of the time, we need to bring the software of connection into the hardware of the office.
Whether your workplace is staying fully remote or bringing everybody back, we need thoughtful collective mechanisms that give social permission for connection.
What is a collective mechanism?
A collective mechanism is a structure (designed or emergent) that helps a group coordinate in relevant and appropriate ways for the good of the group to achieve an outcome. Helpful collective mechanisms can reduce inequity, exclusion, and individual coordinating time. They can be one-time or repetitive, in-person or virtual.
Many cultures around the world build collective mechanisms into the workday. I lived in India for three years. In my workplace, as in many, there was a regular afternoon tea break where everyone would hit pause, hang out in the canteen, and drink tea together. In his excellent book Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman writes about the Swedish Fika, "the daily moment when everyone in a given workplace gets up from their desks to gather for coffee, cake...For half an hour or so, communication and conviviality take precedence over hierarchy and bureaucracy." One senior manager told Burkeman that Fika was "by far the most effective way to learn what was really going on in his company."
Note: this is different than putting snacks out in a cafeteria or having free kombucha and hoping for the best. It’s creating a specific moment in which people have the social permission (and yes, the social pressure) to come together at the same time and the same place and hang. Sure, it can be problematic if not done well. That’s where the testing and designing and thoughtfulness comes in.
The best collective mechanisms are simple. Long before the pandemic, a startup founder I knew started "Bagel Wednesdays" to keep the warm spirit and openness he felt in the early days of his company. They were voluntary and casual and there was only one rule: you couldn't talk about work.
You can do this too. Here’s one thing to practice this month.
Think about the communities you belong to. What are the collective mechanisms — either pre-COVID or right now — that give your people social permission to talk to each other? Do they exist? If so, how did they start? Who started them? If you don't have any in your life right now, might there be room to create one?
As you know, I believe guests have power. Encourage the leaders in your communities to prioritize regular collective mechanisms — particularly in this messy, awkward moment — so that people can actually connect, understand where they are, and feel like they belong. And if you’re not sure how to do that, just start by forwarding them this article.😉
Inspirations
Community designers Christina Harrington, Jennifer Roberts, Kirsten Bray, and N’Deye Diakhate have collaborated on an Afrofuturist-inspired toolkit featuring a series of card decks and envisioning exercises "to help communities imagine new, equitable, liberated futures for themselves." You can learn more about the project at the link above.
One Year After Atlanta: How Asian Women Heal When Misogyny and Racism Endure
One Year After the Atlanta Spa Shootings: Bianca Mabute-Louie reflects on the healing and organizing practices, the gatherings, and the spaces created for and by Asian and Asian American women one year after the Atlanta spa shootings. "And yet, amid the ongoing violence and the failures of our systems, I see us continuing to struggle for something better," she writes in Elle.
Creative Mornings has been experimenting with virtual "FieldTrips" during the pandemic, and they’re growing more robust. This month’s line-up includes a game on meaningful connections, a sound bath, and a "collage and connect." When the world is on fire, a little self-fuel can sometimes help.
