How Leaders Can Foster Connection on Their Teams

At its core, an organization is a bunch of people working toward shared goals, which means that connecting with others and feeling connected to an organization are critical to achieving business objectives.

While that may seem simple, in our evolving workplace, feeling that sense of connection, employee to employee, and employee to organization can be challenging.

Source: HubSpot Hybrid Work Survey, 2023

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The Connection Conundrum: We Like It But Don’t Have Enough of It

Relationships are the leading contributor to workplace well-being. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, many feel less connected. According to Pew Research, 65% of workers feel less connected to their co-workers.

Furthermore, BetterUp found that people who experience more connection at work achieve their goals more often and enjoy greater well-being. They also report better business outcomes, including greater goal attainment (34%), better well-being (36%), and more professional growth (92%). However, 61% of us, according to a Cigna study in 2018 (before the pandemic), struggled with loneliness. Despite the benefits of remote work, Glassdoor found many remote workers feel isolated and disconnected from their organization.

BetterUp discovered this was especially true for remote workers. In their Connection report, they found that remote workers had one fewer work friends than those working in the office, and as a result, can feel up to 19% less of a sense of belonging than their in-person or hybrid teammates.

According to Gallup Research, first-line managers are often the conduit for the everyday employee and their engagement in their role. They are responsible for up to 70% of the variance in that engagement. The manager can impact an employee’s engagement in the role and their relationship with the team and the organization.

This is why managers can foster a connection with their employees and model the importance of connectedness and relationship-building through actions, rewards, and words.

If you are a manager or are training, coaching, and empowering managers, how can you incorporate practical and intentional connection behaviors to improve employee engagement and model behaviors you want your employees to exhibit? Here are examples and suggestions:

#1: Incorporate relationship-building practices into the team workflow

It’s important to differentiate between intensity and consistency. For connection, it’s critical to start with consistency. Building connections with your employees doesn’t have to be team bonding activities, company offsites, or other grand gestures (intensity); it’s everyday rituals and practices you can incorporate into their work. Small habits practiced over time can increase your team’s connection and belonging. Start with identifying opportunities within your existing team workflow where you can connect intentionally. Think about the opportunities and touch points you have with your employees and team throughout two weeks, and identify moments or opportunities where you can connect 1:1 with an employee or as a team.

Example: On a team I led, we spent the first five minutes in our bi-weekly meeting on connection building. First, we spent two minutes doing 1:1 check-ins, where people got a prompt and 60 seconds to answer it with another teammate. Then, we played a small game called “hot seat.” One person would be on the “hot seat,” and someone would ask them a bank of questions. The person on the hot seat had 90 seconds to answer as many questions as possible. The questions enabled us to get to know them personally. These things were cited in our team engagement survey as something people appreciated.

# 2: Encourage your team to connect proactively and intentionally with their stakeholders

Building trusting relationships with stakeholders, peers, and leaders does not happen overnight but through time and work. Many of us wait until we have to work with those people, and we’re trying to build trust and connection and get things done simultaneously.

A better approach is to create time intentionally and repeatedly and deliberately cultivate relationships with key people so that when you have to work with them, you’ve already built connections that make it easier to work together.

As a manager, your job is to help your employees identify the tasks, projects, and work they should be focused on in their role. To help them be more productive and effective, encourage your team members to build relationships with the right people so they are positioned for success.

Example: Before leading major projects or workstreams, my former manager told us to bake in a “Week 0” for any project. This week was for getting to know key stakeholders to understand them better. During these conversations, we’d get to know them and their challenges, goals, and preferred working styles. As a result, it made collaborating and getting buy-in from stakeholders run smoother.

#3: Practice and encourage your team to give feedback proactively

According to Workhuman research, employees who feel recognized are more likely to be satisfied, productive, engaged, and less likely to leave. Giving regular, consistent, and actionable feedback to employees helps them gain clarity on how they are doing and opportunities to improve. It also shows you are paying attention to their work and want them to succeed.

To go a step further, encourage and empower them to proactively provide feedback to their peers and colleagues because many employees want more feedback (caveat: helpful feedback). This seems meta, but let me explain. First, doing this helps them. If you give specific examples to a peer of what they are doing well, it will be easier the next time you work with them. Second, it helps your employees build their connections because giving feedback is a form of connection. Finally, when you give helpful feedback regularly, you get more feedback yourself. This is helpful because employees will gain more insight into how they are doing, and they will feel connected.

Example: The next time you see someone do something positive, give them feedback, but do it publicly. You can also start a feedback channel in your Slack or other messaging platform. In this thread, people can publicly acknowledge when someone on the team does something positive. Each quarter, encourage your team to find one person they worked with during the quarter who did something well and encourage them to reach out to that individual to provide this feedback.

#4: Make Building Relationships Part of Your Job

As a manager, your job is to get your team to deliver an aligned result. This means working through and with others to achieve this goal. You are also expected to partner across the organization while interacting with your leaders and executives. Your ability to effectively do this often correlates with how good your relationships are with these people, which takes time, work, effort, and intention.

You need to find the things that are of the highest value and most critical. Since positive relationships can impact your results, it’s important to engage in actions and activities that build relationships to achieve those results.

In our interview on The Edge of Work , Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, MD en Kellerman of BetterUp said:

“The barriers to connection presented by the modern way of work are significant and will become even more so in the decades to come. We will continue to feel that we have no time for each other. We will continue to feel physically distant because we are. And will continue to feel like we belong because of the real differences that divide us.”

How can you find time to intentionally build relationships? Dr. Kellerman suggested “rapid rapport ,” or small and consistent actions of empathy and compassion that build trust and connection over time. She gave examples of how to do this and cited the idea of time affluence to make time to focus on building relationships.

In the research paper “Giving Time Gives You Time ,” professors from Wharton, Yale, and Harvard wanted to find out how to help busy people discover how to find time. They designed an experiment to test four strategies:

●???? Giving people time back in their day that had been committed to a task

●???? Asking people to spend that same time on a task helping others

●???? Asking people to waste the time

●???? Asking people to spend that time on themselves

Their research found that when we help others for even 15 or 30 minutes, we experience that as time added to our day rather than lost. Helping ourselves does nothing.

We can use this concept of rapid rapport with the employees on our team, our stakeholders, and the leaders we manage with to produce better results.

Example: In her article on rapid rapport, Dr. Kellerman suggested two sentences and scripts you can use with your colleagues to help strengthen rapid rapport:

●???? For a direct report: Great job today. I know it’s been tough this past week. I see how hard you work and am proud to work alongside you.

●???? For a stakeholder or peer: I admire how you are rolling with the punches. I want you to know you’re not in it alone. I’m here, too, and we’ll figure it out together.

#5: Publicly Acknowledge and Share How You Are Connecting with Others

As a manager, your actions scale. The actions you take, the behaviors you model, and the words you say are things your team takes cues from as they work. To improve your team’s connection or how it connects, call attention to what you are doing and acknowledge and reward others who are also doing it. This means sharing your approaches to connect with your peers, colleagues, and leaders and highlighting and publicly encouraging your team members when you see them doing the same thing.

These don’t have to be grand gestures but rather small moments and instances where you share how much you value connectedness on your team through your actions and words. This does two things. First, it makes the importance of connection clear to your employees. Second, it encourages them through practical ways to connect with others.

Conclusion

During my conversation with Dr. Kellerman, she said something that inspired me to write this piece:

“We need each other; we need to matter to each other. We need each other to feel, be, and live well. We need each other to succeed personally and professionally. And our organizations rely on social behaviors to drive productivity, innovation, and customer success.”

Employees feeling connected, whether hybrid, remote, or in-person, is essential to business success. It starts with you as a manager modeling that for your employees.

It's difficult for a team to succeed without it's leader, so if you want to improve your connection with your employees and the overall sense of connection and belonging on your team, it starts with the actions you take, the words you say, and the behaviors you reward.