Is it OK to be Human at work?

How often do you have this conversation when you come into the office in the morning?

Bot 1: ‘Good Morning. How are you?’

Bot 2: ‘Yeah all good cheers, you?’

Bot 1: ‘Not bad thanks… Cool… Have a good one’

Bot 2: ‘Yeah you too’

… I have this interaction far too often and I accept my responsibility in letting this happen, but can we actually attribute any value to this interaction? I don’t think so. Neither party has actually shown any real interest in their counterpart, and neither party can say they have a greater connection as a result.

But this type of interaction is symptomatic of a wider issue within the workplace and indeed in society. We don’t see each other as humans. For some reason, particularly when we enter the workplace, we adopt a bizarre persona which manifests in overly formal behaviour and/or pointless and superficial interactions that add no real value to our work, OR the relationships they are intended to develop.

“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” — Stephen R. Covey.

How about emails? Got a question for a colleague who sits 10 yards away – Why bother walking over to their desk, just send an email that reads something like:

‘Hello Luke,

I have finished that report on X, have you finished the X section? I want to pull it together and send it over to X later today. If you can get it over to me ASAP that would be great.

Kind Regards,

X’

Kind Regards? what is going on here? I can physically see you when I open the email – is that level of formality really necessary?… If an email rather than a conversation is preferable, why not something more casual?

‘Dude, I am sending that report over today. Send me your section over when you get a sec. Cheers, bud.’

Clearly ‘dude’ and ‘bud’ are interchangeable with any name/greeting/colloquialism you are comfortable with – Ideally you have an established relationship with the recipient as you spend every working day with them, so you will know what language they will be comfortable with. If you don’t know the language they are comfortable with then my point is proven. Go over and make the effort to find out, it’s OK to be first in this instance and the relationship will be the stronger for it moving forward.

The point is, you are emailing a person, so it is OK to use language that is reflective of this.

If we are communicating in a strange staged formality then no one is being genuine. Which means you aren’t actually getting to know and understand your colleagues. This isn’t good.

This is also true of how we seem to build ‘relationships’ with customers or clients – Now I completely understand that there has to be a certain level of formality to interactions with clients, particularly if you are in the early stages of establishing a relationship. But we shouldn’t forget that the person on the end of the phone or email is a human too. That means that they have the same capacity for emotive response as you (generally speaking). With that in mind, perhaps it is time to strip back some of the formality and lead with genuinely personalised content? You will be much more likely to elicit an emotive reaction and thus much more likely to encourage a response to your communication.

But all of this starts in the office. If we get our internal communication right this will naturally be impressed on our relationships with clients and customers. I am 100% sure that a well thought out and properly qualified personal communication will be much better received than an overly formal copy and paste generic approach.

We live in the information age, in a world where we all share our lives on social media to some degree – How hard is it to do a little bit of research and make a genuine attempt to understand and relate to the individual you are speaking to?

My call to action is for you to be human in all that you do. Treat the individual you are communicating with as a person and not a ‘job title’.

Give it a go and see how much better your relationships become with everyone you communicate with.

Better yet, start with me – Say hello, don’t be shy :)

Contact Me

0207 187 6206 – 07507 512 809 - [email protected]