Making Personal Connections

Let’s talk a little bit about employee engagement. We are in a world now where wow, so much change has happened in the last two years. A lot of us are now in distributed workforces, we work remotely, you’re working remotely a lot now, I work remotely. What strategies or techniques do you use to enhance and maintain employee engagement amid all these changes?

It’s really hard. I would say that I think this isolation has been really hard. Until maybe Q2 of last year, my thought was that we were just all going to come back to work, it’s going to happen, like we were all marching towards it, and then came July, first, Delta, then Omicron, then whatever, and now BA.2. I feel like I’ve accepted the fact that how we are going to gather will be quite different than it was pre-pandemic. We still actually don’t know how it’s going to all shape up and how it’s going to become what’s the “new normal,” but it is definitely different.
So, I think you have to get personal through whatever interface you have. For me, I find the video conferencing to actually be less interesting than sometimes just having a phone call. So, what I try to do with my one-on-ones is do a phone call, and take a walk because I used to do a lot of walks with my one-on-ones, just on my own, and the other person can do whatever they’re doing, but we’re not tied to the desk.
And in that flow, I find a lot of conversation and discussions that happen. And now that the world is opening up, I think having the connections are really, really important. And I think as a company, we are trying to do both offline connections and sort of the kind of, guidance that we do, working a lot in helping employees with mental health and sort of wellness on that front.