Finding Value in the “Little Connections”

What do you do regularly to improve the way your team operates when it’s so distributed and so remote?

So, we’ve been back in the office now for a couple of months at a reduced occupancy level, not everybody. So, people have to sign up, you have to be vaccinated, all those things that the county requires. But what I found in just a little bit of time that I’ve been back in the office, from my walk from the front door to my office, and then from the office to another meeting room, any given time you run into somebody, maybe one or two people, and you have a 30 seconds conversation and you add it up over the course of the day, then over the course of the week, then over the course of a month. That’s a lot of very short sync ups, like “Whoa, how’s that going?” But it conveys the message, “oh, that’s on my mind.” “Oh, that’s important,” Or, “Hey, can I help you?”

And these are very short conversations, which, in the world Zoom is just disappearing. No one’s going to call you, “Hey, Thuy let me get 30 seconds for a non-important little thing.” Who’s going to do that? But seemingly the non-important, it actually lends a glimpse into what the company is thinking about, these little things, so it’s kind of like, “Hey, how is that going?” Maybe that person has got 20 other things they are working on. But me walking in and asking about that, that actually makes that important. It’s not like burning in my mind, but that’s what’s visible to me. And so I found those little connections between people. If that’s happening to me, I can only imagine what’s happening out there with the other 500 people, everyone is doing these tiny little chats. It’s really valuable when you’re trying to build the fabric of a company.