I remember the stomach flutters before my first performance review and my first job out of college. To say I was overeager to perform is an understatement. I was grinding. I worked around the clock. I spent hours finessing my Power Points, took meticulous meeting notes and never missed a deadline. Which is why I felt completely blindsided when I actually received my review. My boss sent me down and told me that I needed to work on connecting better with my clients and building relationships with them. Apparently, nobody knew anything about me. Building relationships with my clients? That's what they cared about? I couldn't understand when I was working so hard to deliver quality work, and I wish I could say I underwent some immediate transformation where I became some fabulous connector and lived happily ever after. But in truth, I didn't really know what to do and I fumbled for a few more years. My clients were remote most of the time. I wasn't working with them, and I didn't know how to relate to them because there were so much younger than me. It was years later that I was pursuing my PhD, and like the old saying goes, "research is me-search." And my initial me-search focused on burnout and work engagement because I knew what it was like to experience burnout. And what was surprising to me was that I always assumed that burnout was just the result of having too much work and feeling really depleted from too much work. But in fact, there's so many other factors that can play a role, and an important one was community and connection. People can be burnt out because they feel disrespected, unsupported and disconnected from their colleagues. This stood out to me. I had always focused on work output and things that would produce actual revenue and quality work for a company. And this was conditioned by my years of schooling, where I was rewarded with good grades because I put in the effort and I worked hard. But in truth, work is full of real, flesh-and-bone people who want to feel connected and they do their best work when they feel like they're fully engaged, like their work truly matters and like they're doing something bigger than just themselves.

When the pandemic struck, as we all know, offices around the globe closed, and my colleagues and I started studying this transition into remote work, remote work-life balance, what it was like being in this new space. And this is where I really started to see the effect of connections and loneliness really came front and center. It was more than struggling to, you know, the fear of getting sick or juggling childcare. The isolation hit deep. People lost the casual interactions they had when they walked in the office. And what was interesting is that a deeper dive into the research showed that loneliness had been on the rise well before the pandemic. According to the US Surgeon General, nearly 50 percent of US adults experienced loneliness pre-pandemic. And that number continues to rise. So at this point, my me-search shifted, as I began to wonder about the effects of connections, especially in the context of work and how that impacted people in remote interactions, if it stifled the way people were able to connect. So for my dissertation, I focused on research, initially spearheaded by Dr. Jane Dutton, on high-quality connections at work. And to understand high-quality connections, I want you to think back on the last time you had a positive connection with someone. Doesn't matter how long it was. Could have been a friend, colleague, someone you met for the first time, but you felt more open with them. You felt like you truly cared. You felt mutually connected. And when you left, you felt a little more energized and uplifted. And it didn't necessarily need to be a happy experience. It could have been about something difficult and raw, but you felt more bound together. That's a high-quality connection. And I was curious about whether having higher-quality connections throughout the day led to higher levels of engagement at the end of the day. And what I found was fascinating. Yes, it did lead to higher levels of engagement, but it didn't matter how many interactions you had or how long you spent in those interactions. So if you spent your entire day having high-quality interactions with different people, or just one high-quality connection with one person, you still tended to feel more engaged. I was also curious about the way that people were interacting. I wanted to know if you needed to be in person, face-to-face, in order to have these deep, meaningful connections. Because previous researchers suggest that you do need to be in-person in order to have those deep connections. So I asked people how they interacted. Were you in person and face to face? Were you video conferencing with the camera on or were you chatting through audio? And audio could be a phone call, it could be video conferencing with the camera off. And what I found was that there was no difference between in-person connections and video conferencing with the camera on. So in other words, if we're chatting face-to-face or if we're chatting through video conferencing and we can see each other, we're able to connect in a similar way. Only-audio interactions produce lower-quality connections. And third, and this was surprising and something I wasn't even looking for, but the final thing I found was the effect of burnout. People who were burnt out, it had a tremendous effect on whether they were even able to engage in quality connections. And that does make sense, because people who are burnt out tend to withdraw, whereas people who are connecting, you need to put in that effort. So burnt out individuals had a hard time even making those high-quality connections. So my research showed that having high-quality connections is very important for engagement. And a recent study from McKinsey and LeanIn.org found that about 60 percent of in-person workers, employees, tended to experience connectivity, compared to fewer than 20 percent of remote and hybrid workers.

So how do we build these connections in a remote environment or at all? So here's the advice I would have given 22-year-old me who was fumbling to make connections. Number one is expand, or aiming for more expansive dialogue. It helps you go beyond these polite greetings and helps you dig a bit more beneath the surface. And there are two ways that you can do this. One is to ask expansive, open-ended questions, and the other is to answer questions expansively. Asking expansive, open-ended questions encourages the other person to open up and share a bit more about themselves. Think about this as if you're talking to a child coming home from school. If you ask them, "How was your day?" The response will probably be -- “Um, fine.” If you ask them, "What was the most exciting thing or fun thing or boring thing about your day," you're more likely to get a better answer. So in a similar way, when you ask your colleague, "How was your weekend?" You're probably not going to get a great response. Try something like, "What was the highlight of your weekend?" And then ask for more. Probe a little deeper. Answering questions expansively encourages you to open up and share more about yourself, and give someone else the opportunity to share more in return. For instance, if you're on a remote call, you're on a Zoom call with a remote team member, and they haphazardly ask about our most favorite topic, the weather. You could just say what they're expecting, which is, "Yeah, it's pretty cold." Or you can answer a bit more expansively. So, for instance, I could say, "Well, my neighbors were making fun of me this morning when I was walking my dog wearing my big puffer jacket when it was in the mid 50s. Is it cold by you?" And yes, this is real, this is me and my dog in the mid 50s. So what that does is that encourages them to open up because they've now learned a little bit more about you. They have more insight into your life. And now they're more open to sharing about their own. Number two is overlap, or finding things in common. As human beings, we like to feel like we belong, and having things in common with one another helps us bond. When I was younger, I used to think that being in the same life stage was a prerequisite for having things in common, but it's just not true. Maybe you're both cat people, or you both love country music. You both went gorilla trekking in Uganda, or you're both just sick and tired of hearing about politics on the news. It may take some time to uncover these commonalities, but asking questions and using the visual cues you have, even if it's just through their video screen, can help. And you can do this in reverse, using your background as a way for other people to learn more about you and find commonalities with you. So especially if you're a remote worker, think of your background as a conversation starter. You can have photos of travel or your pets. You could have artwork or books that you love, anything that could prompt conversation and engagement. All of these things can help people find things in common and help you bond. Third, and this is one of the most important ones, is caring and showing that you truly care and that you appreciate the other person that you're conversing with. If you're on your phone or scrolling through your computer, and the other person's talking to you, it signals that whatever is on your screen is much more important than your conversation with them. On the flip side, if you're listening attentively, you're nodding, you're asking questions related to what they're asking, what they're talking about, you're laughing at their jokes, you're nodding, you're taking notes, you're fully engaging. That signals that you appreciate them and you care. And these types of interactions, they energize people. They boost their self-esteem, and they make them feel closer to you. So: expand, overlap and care. These are three things that can help you build stronger connections with others. But none of them are effective unless they are done authentically. And this is, for most people, the hardest part. But just like you notice when someone's nodding but clearly not listening, complimenting you but clearly doesn't mean it, or asking you questions but couldn't care less about your answer, others notice when you're doing it back. You have to dig deep, not just going through the motions or thinking of it as a checklist, but truly figuring out how to care.

Leaders have an additional responsibility. They set the tone. So if they signal that they don't care about connecting with others, their employees are likely to follow. On the other hand, if they expand, overlap and care in an authentic way, that shows that it's important for their team members to follow as well. Leaders that have remote team members have an additional responsibility, because their employees don't have those casual chats when they walk in the office, or lunches where they happen to chit chat with people. Leaders need to have a better pulse on their team and be more intentional about setting up time for people to connect. Yes, having video conferences with the camera on is a great first step. But it's not enough. You really need to build in time to connect. That could mean holding a few minutes in the beginning of meetings to chit chat or to ask questions to learn more. It could mean having virtual lunches with people, either with the leader and other team members or team members amongst themselves. Employing some kind of employee listening strategy could help you understand what your employees are truly feeling. Are they burnt out? Do they feel valued? Do they feel heard? Acting on those things that you hear as a leader helps signal that you are truly listening and trying to implement and act on their feedback. Creating polls and using your chat channels to learn more about their sense of humor, their personalities, their preferences, is a great way to use the tools that you have to connect better. And if possible, having in-person meetings from time to time can help solidify relationships. There are so many ways that leaders can help their remote team members connect, but the core pieces are to find the time and space to connect, to use some kind of employee listening strategy so that they're gathering and acting on continuous feedback, and to be intentional with your time together. The average person spends about a third of their life at work, and for so many people, work is a prolonged source of stress and strain. We can do better. Let's do our part to connect a little more, engage a little more, and make work truly work for us. Thank you. (Applause)