A Remote Best Friend at Work

Nearly 10 years ago, I was recruited to help with new student orientation at my undergraduate university. I met a plethora of students, answered questions, showed them around, and tried to offer any advice that I could. About 2 weeks after orientation, I received a text message from an unknown number asking if I could meet them to talk about how to get involved on campus. I didn't know who the number was from but context clues indicated it was someone from orientation. I showed up to the cafe not knowing who I was going to meet, I didn't know gender, height, hair, shoe size...nothing to identify so I hoped the person would find me.

An accounting student named Deanna came up to me and thanked me for agreeing to meet with her. I supposed she was the mystery texter and I sat down with her to chat. We ended up talking for hours. We became really good friends, I met her friends and family and she met mine and we ended up going on adventures together, we went with our friends to Thailand, we became housemates, we became super great friends. All of this started from a single day connection orientation.

Gallup studies show that the number one indicator of engagement at work (or engagement at school) is having a best friend. So, in this remote at home life, how can we create an environment that is conducive to building best friendships virtually? This is a question I've been mulling over the past few months, here's my thoughts:

First, initiate. In this season as a speaker, I have given 5 times as many presentations as I did last year. However, I realized back in May that I could make it through the end of this year, spoken at all of these great events surrounded by amazing speakers, and not have met anyone. I began reaching out to fellow speakers, organizers, attendees of the conferences and started setting up virtual coffee chats to meet people.

I don't have an agenda. I'm not selling any products and services with The Pathwayz Group, I'm actually genuinely there for casual conversation and relationship building and relationship maintenance. Some times, there is room for collaboration, ways that we can help one another, and sometimes it's just great conversation. The goal of social networking events and sites shouldn't be to collect connections, it's to have conversations and build relationships. None of this happens without first initiating conversations whether that be maintaining a current relationship or creating a new one.

Then, follow up. Listen to what people are saying, see if there is a way that you can support, show interest, collaborate on projects. Follow up generally comes from asking good questions and listening in the initial conversation. Rather than asking, what do you do? I try to ask more interesting slightly altered questions like what are you working on, what are looking forward to, what is something that you have discovered recently. These questions lead to greater understanding, actually is a way more interesting conversation, and paves a path for business colleagues to turn to friendships.

I was speaking with a professional colleague just the other day and he is coming with his family to Tulsa later next year. It was at that point that I realized that we actually hadn't ever met in person but we had spent so much time in follow up conversation that we already had a good foundation of a relationship. Why? We didn't have just one conversation about business, we followed up conversations.

Finally, create exit doors if people want to say no. Let the person know that if they are not interested in putting energy into another relationship, it's okay. Some are so busy with family, home life, stress of the season, and other things that an added event on the calendar is just daunting. I've had some people say that they are really wanting to invest this time in family, alone time, their dogs, suffering from screen fatigue, some might not feel comfortable sharing especially to a person they've only seen on a screen. It's okay to say no, hakuna matata, no hard feelings. Be available if the situation changes, but don't force relationships. That's just awkward.

These are super simple steps but they can lead to really great friendships. So, here's what I want you to do, think of a person that is on your team, from an event, or even me and initiate a conversation. Say, hey, I know that in a non COVID world we probably would have met at some point so would you like to fabricate that otherwise organic meeting sometime this week for 15-20-30 minutes? And then, see where the conversation goes!