Workplace Loneliness and Human Connection in the Age of AI

Great Expectations Podcast – Episode 2: Constance Noonan Hadley

Paul Sephton:

Hi, I'm Paul, and this is Great Expectations, the Jabra podcast that cuts through the AI noise to bring you clear, actionable insights from the world's top thinkers. If you're trying to futureproof your business, you're in the right place. We don't do hype, just the info you need to make smart strategic calls about the future of work. Today I'm excited to be flipping the script and talking about something that doesn't really get enough airtime in tech circles with AI today. And that's people because no matter how powerful AI gets, it's still humans who are going to be making work work. So with that in mind, I'm really thrilled to be joined by Dr. Constance Noonan Hadley. Connie is a top organizational psychologist, a professor at Boston University and founder of the Institute for Life at Work. She's one of the sharpest minds out there when it comes to team dynamics, workplace loneliness and building real connection. In this episode, Connie, you'll be digging into why modern teams are more isolated now than ever, how to build stronger bonds at work and whether AI is ultimately bringing us closer together or driving us further apart. Well, I think firstly super excited to have you joining us today. So thank you so much for making the time, Connie.

Constance Noonan Hadley:

I'm so happy to be here. Thank you.

Paul Sephton:

It's really interesting to look at team dynamics. I think there are a few key issues people might be wanting to look at. So how would you set the scene for how team leads consider their team dynamics and what they should be paying attention to?

Constance Noonan Hadley:

I'm really glad that there's been even more attention over the last six, nine months to the issue of workplace loneliness, including our HBR article, the one I wrote with Sarah Wright because I think it's a good reminder that we haven't solved this yet. We have long passed the pandemic. We're moving into a new era dominated by AI and all sorts of other different kinds of economic and political trends, but we can work on this, we can fix this. So I would give every team leader, if I could, a little bit of a boost to say, try building the connections among your team members that is going to pay dividends in so many different ways throughout the year.

Paul Sephton:

Is loneliness something that's been on the radar for years but has only recently gotten more attention or was it really more of a direct consequence of things that have happened or changed in our work landscape over the past five years or decade?

Constance Noonan Hadley:

It's a little bit of both. First of all, loneliness is not new, but it has been getting worse over the past couple of decades. And then the pandemic really accelerated that downward trend of people feeling disconnected at work. But it is important that people know that this isn't something that was just driven by the pandemic or even just driven by remote work and the increased use of that. I think there are a lot of different reasons why we're finding more loneliness at work. We can extrapolate by some of the sociological work that's been done by, like Robert Putnam was a famous book, bowling Alone. He's looking at just societal trends of people not being connected. Bowling alone is the concept of people used to be in bowling leagues now they just go and bowl by themselves. And I think that has infiltrated the workplace environment as well.

People keep to themselves maybe a little bit more, they're not as much of a joiner. They don't have so many activities planned for them. And then there's the way that work has changed over the last few decades as well, and I think that is increasingly creating the climate for loneliness. And one of the big ones that Sarah and I talk about in our article is the pace of work. The pace of work being so intense, the productivity pressure so high that's been enabled by all these tools and by being able to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, I think it's crowded out a lot of the normal socialization that people used to get at work. And when you don't have any slack at all in your system, I think the first thing that go is the things that seem somehow optional or not productive, like just talking with someone.

Paul Sephton:

Do you think those things have changed in terms of the fabric and culture that makes up companies where maybe now it's more taboo to have a long water cooler chat, whereas actually that was sort of the hidden glue in teams and companies over the last a hundred years of

Constance Noonan Hadley:

Work? I think so. I think there's some value to inconvenience. We talk about the value of just having to wait in the bank line, allowed you to chat with people in your neighborhood. And I think similarly at work, maybe the times when you were waiting for that printout or that fax to come through gave you a few extra moments to have a conversation with someone. And as we became more efficient and as things became faster, I think we forgot that that wasn't just all about inconvenience, that there actually was some value to it too.

Paul Sephton:

At the same time though, I think the last five years or so I've at least noticed a trend where individuality is far more on the radar of leaders. And like you said, there are sometimes team events where people don't want to show up or they just aren't unnecessarily getting as much energy. They're not extroverts necessarily. I know that's a very sort of back and white way of looking at it, but how do you think you can sort of spot loneliness, cater to it or cater to avoiding it, being able to foster good team dynamics without having some type of cookie cutter mold of sort of we do a pub quiz every second Friday or we have a quarterly dinner together. What are some of the ways to navigate it in modern times?

Constance Noonan Hadley:

Well, first of all, you've raised a lot of different issues including people's personalities and their personal preferences. And one of the values of the work that Sarah and I did is that we captured that. We captured introversion versus extroversion and we captured their inherent need to belong at work, which is not exactly the same thing as your introversion. It is really this sense of do you actually want to connect with people at work? Maybe you're just one of those people who has a really full exhausting home life and you come to work to just get the work done and that's just not something of interest to you. When we did look at those variables in relation to loneliness, the first one we found is that introverts do tend to be lonelier than extroverts. So it's not true that, oh, I'm an introvert. I don't want to go to that happy hour, I don't like happy hours, I don't need that.

Well, at the same time, they're expressing higher rates of loneliness. And then on the other hand, the need to belong factor was completely separate from loneliness. It didn't matter. Even if I'm a kind of person who does just want to get in and get out of my work and not spend a ton of time bonding with other coworkers, if whatever minimal amount I'm looking for isn't achieved, I'm still going to be lonely. What this means is that we can't just apply these as sort of this black and white methodology to say, oh, well these types of people are going to be lonely. It's their issue. They don't want to go to these things or they don't care about this stuff, so let's just leave them aside. We need to be thinking about everybody has social needs at work. They may be higher or lower, they may be slightly different than others, but we need to work together so that everyone can feel that level of fulfillment.

Because when you think about it, if you're a lonely introvert at work, then that means you're not being as productive. You're more likely to leave, you're less satisfied with your job, you're more likely to have health problems. So we should address this for everybody. Now, in terms of what the remedies are though, here's the good news. When Sarah and I did this project, we were looking at giving people a lot of different options for what kinds of social activities they actually would want to go to. And then we even pushed them a little bit more to say, how long would you stay? Don't just show up at the happy hour for half an hour, but would you stay for the whole time? Or similarly would you actually answer the prompts in an open discussion in a meeting? And what we found is that we thought there would be really different preferences based on people's backgrounds including personality, but also things like whether they've kids at home or whether there they're a male or female or they're a remote worker or in-person worker.

And the good news is we didn't find those differences. And the reason it's good news is because although we want to personalize things, I do think there's some just general practices that help the majority people and that when done well, we'll bring people together. And the top three across every type of category we looked at, pretty much we're having free lunches where people get together. We're devoting five to 10 minutes of regular team meetings to chit chat and then finally doing the happy hours. And I say that knowing that I am a person who dreads happy hours, I will fully admit this, I get very anxious in unstructured social situations. I'm good at hosting a party. I'm not good at just attending a party, so I'm not advocating for this because I just happen to be this raging extrovert who loves doing all these things.

I'm doing it because I know they work and I know that we haven't figured out a better solution. So I would say for the manager, the implication is you should be looking at every single person no matter what their background is and trying to aid their connection level, and B, you couldn't do that. So from pretty simple steps, it's not really that complicated. It's not that hard. The key though is to do them well. So when you talk about your trivia contests every other week, you mean you would want to actually design these events in the details of them when they are, where they are, how long they last, what prompts you have based on conversations with the people that are going to attend. Often this will be sort of offloaded to somebody like in HR or employee engagement, and then they just design something that makes sense to them but doesn't actually include what the people want.

And then the other thing I would say, and this is something that people often overlook is that it's not enough just to offer an occasion. You actually have to recruit people to attend. So when you post up, oh, we're going to have happy hour next Thursday, you'll probably find the more extroverted people saying, great, I'm there. You have to go out and get the other people to come. And it's part of the process because especially when people become lonely, they stop wanting to say yes to any invitation, which I know doesn't make sense. It's like cutting off their noses by their face. But it makes sense when you think about that. When you're lonely, you start to feel that nobody sees you, nobody cares about you, nobody's interested in being with you, and so you don't trust that these occasions are for you. You don't think that people really care if you're there.

You don't think people will miss you if you're not. And so you have to go out there and say, no, we do care. We do want you there. Please come. And we saw evidence of that in the interviews we did where people would say, I resisted. I said no at first, but once I attended, oh my gosh, I realized I had all these things in common with people. I realized I really did want to get to know them better. They did care about me. And then things start to transform. So you need this kind of well-designed structure and then you need lots of personal invitations.

Paul Sephton:

I think like you say, it's not one of those things where it's if you build it, they will come. And so it takes a lot more rallying to get people there. But we've all been in happy hour type of occasions where after some weather, small talk fizzles out, you can see that people don't really know how to engage in a conversation. And you could argue that this is because of mass differences across generations from a different culture and a globalized workforce might not feel that. I have a lot to say to a colleague of mine who's from a different generation with a different family life and a different sort of cultural background, and I just don't really know how to begin mapping it. How much of it do you think comes down to psychological safety or teams setting up the right structures to break down those barriers that lead to the small talk? Just settling after five minutes?

Constance Noonan Hadley:

I'm glad you asked that because although the advice that I was just describing, it's really at the macro level, at the whole organizational level. How do you think about a social infrastructure or how do you build in practices that will recruit people? I think the real actions at the team level, because you already have a built-in connection point, you're a member of a team and it doesn't take that much. They call it the minimal group membership. Even just assigning a color to a group of people would suddenly make them feel like a team. So think about an actual team. You have so much more in common at work to build upon, and once you get that going, you can really fuse a team together. For example, when you think about how to design a way to have a conversation amongst each other, I just finished a research project with a group out of the Middle East cosmic Cent, and we were looking at team rituals.

And one of the ways to prompt these conversations is building on the previous research saying five to 10 minutes of a meeting to do some chitchat is to do a prompt. There are lots of groups have conversation cards like Cosmos Center says their own. There was this one group where we said, okay, so we're going to start off this practice. You haven't been doing it together in team. We're going to give you these questions that you can ask. And there were more simple questions, where did you grow up? Or something like that. And they were like, no, no, no, we're going to dive deep. And they chose questions. What part of your childhood would you redo and why? And what was fabulous about that is because it was a team decision, the team chose these prompts and then to your point about how do you get past the small talk, they skipped right over small talk.

That was an all softball question to start with, and so I wouldn't necessarily recommend that you decide that as a manager, but because the team sorted through the cards and picked out the one that they as a group decided to use, they were all bought in and starting that deep leads you then to having much more meaningful conversations. And you can go up back to the weather more superficial, but you can also go back down again. What I'm saying is that the team is this fabulous playground to build those kinds of connections. And when you engage people in making those decisions about how to structure your prompts and your conversations to get the ball rolling, you'd be amazed at what people actually do want to talk about.

Paul Sephton:

And how much of it do you think is something now with this remote and hybrid and in office shift that has to happen in person because it's a lot of speculation and each company's taking a different path on we have to do two face-to-faces annually if we're a remote first organization or on the counterside bringing everyone back for a five day office for those kind of impromptu ad hoc water cooler moments. What's the sort of advice to digital versus physical and the right places to host different types of engagements?

Constance Noonan Hadley:

I'm going to give you an it depends answer, which is the favorite answer of any scientist? Yes, if you have an opportunity to do these kinds of social activities or prompted conversations in person, I think it does make it easier just like it also makes it easier to do it in a small team versus an entire town hall. But on the other hand, I find ways too many companies and managers are thinking they can't do it unless they're a person which then stymies the effort because they have a hybrid workforce or they have many people who live across the world. So the problem is then they're just not doing anything. And I think there's so much you can do remotely. So I'll give you even just a personal example. We had after the George Floyd murders here in the us, one of our offices at Boston University decided to have an optional discussion group and it was a series of four conversations.

It was faculty and staff and we were given homework to read or things to watch, and then we came together and we talked. It was completely virtual. I walked away from that four hours of virtual time with those people feeling like I really knew them. I felt like one of our questions that judge loneliness is whether you feel people have your back, I really felt like these people had my back By the end, we had these deep conversations, we were open and vulnerable. That was all done remotely. So I think that we're getting into this mindset of we have to wait to do this until we're in person and that's going to just continue to drag this out forever.

Paul Sephton:

It's an interesting point that you mentioned around one of the things that is a good measure of loneliness or foundation is if people have your back or not. It's a bit of a chicken and egg situation. Where do you have to have everything sort of harmonious when it comes to the actual work you're doing to be able to then build and have these types of social bridges that are being built? Or if you have a workplace that's in disarray or kind of silos of information and things aren't really gelling as a team that do you first get the work right or do you first try to get the social foundation and then people start to think that they have each other's backs more from a work perspective?

Constance Noonan Hadley:

That's a really interesting question and it reminds me I didn't fully address your topic of psychological safety before, which I want to get back to because that really is I think a key to this, especially at the team level. So psychological safety is when you feel that you can take an interpersonal risk without fear of undue punishment or ostracization. The thing about psychological safety that often people get wrong is they think it means everything's harmonious and that's actually not true. What psychological safety means is that I can take a risk, I can disagree with you, I can challenge you, I can challenge the status quo. I can offer a brand new idea, I can offer a different perspective. All these things that could potentially create conflict but are manageable because we know that you and I trust that each other is doing this for the good of the work and doing it in a respectful way.

And so similarly, I don't think that you need to have this team that feels so completely relaxed and comfortable with each other in order to have these conversations to build this kind of relationship. So I definitely think chicken or the egg, the relationship building needs to start immediately before that's happened. But what is really helpful is building psychological safety first because psychological safety will say that if I reveal something about my background, so for example, that story about people talking about things they've changed in their childhood, if I say something that is potentially embarrassing for me or maybe alienating some people, I want to know You're not going to punish me for that. I want to know that you're going to say, I'm listening to you, I'm trying to understand you. I'm leading with empathy towards you. So that's something that is essential to establish as best you can before, but again, you don't have to be perfect at it because usually when you have these conversations, also the psychological safety builds.

And then in terms of whether your work is in disarray and not well done and siloed and that kind of thing, I would say relationships will help you solve a lot of that, especially going across silos. But the key to this kind of relationship work is to be really thoughtful and systematic about it. And if all those other problems are representative of a general sense of chaos in your work climate, I'm not sure that it's possible. I just don't know that you could achieve the kinds of relationship building that I'm saying. So what do you do first in that case? Obviously you get your ducks in a row and figure out what you're doing. There's a lot of other great research and some of the stuff that I've contributed to is how do you run a team well, and one of the first things is have a common clear mission that everybody's bought into, start getting your team organized and put together well, and then you can hopefully start incorporating more of these relationship building tactics.

Paul Sephton:

I've got about 10 more questions about the relationship building piece, but I think that the point you sort of bridge to around fundamentals for team management and then rituals feel like they might be complimentary in terms of good team management requires certain rituals. Perhaps it's a good chance to speak about the 1 0 1 for new team leads on what to look out for or focus the most on. Like you say, start with the team mission and then after that,

Constance Noonan Hadley:

Right there is a real connection between loneliness and team design. So Mark Mortenson and I wrote an article a few years ago talking about how we're designing teams now just looking at the structure of them and how it could increase loneliness inadvertently, no one's doing this on purpose, but one of them is this common practice of having really fluid membership. So going back to my general comment about how we're looking for productivity in every second. So fluid membership means that I might be on the team this week and not next week and somebody else is going to come in. So we've sort of designed it in a way that you're in and you're out that really undermines connections. People are like, I don't even know who's on this team. If you don't know who's wearing the jersey, how are you going to play ball together?

The second one is having modularized roles. And that means where you feel like you're only there for a thin slice of what you can do. I might be just there to run that analysis. And when you talk about strategy, oh, I'm not included, I don't get to comment on that, or marketing or whatever. So that also can dehumanize people and make them feel like I'm just your widget. I'm just contributing this one thing. Another thing is part-time commitments, which is when people are on lots of teams at the same time. And so the average in some of our studies is like three different teams. Well, that is really good from an efficiency standpoint. That means if one of my teams has a lull, I'm rarely active on another team, but it also means, again, I'm dividing my time, my energy, my relationship building efforts across all these different teams.

And so it just splinters my commitment and my attention to each person. And then the last one is short duration. So we know about agile teams and scrums and those kinds of things. Again, designed for real great reasons they can be very effective. It's certain short term projects and brainstorming, that kind of thing, but you're not there long enough to really get to know people. So when you think about how to design a team, you've got to balance out these productivity and efficiency desires with the desire to create this sense of community and connection that will lead to these other great outcomes for you. So that's one aspect. And then we talk about the process. So that's structure. This is process. So process is where we look at, okay, so imagine you have done your best to design the team as well as you can, keeping in mind all those factors.

Now how do you run the team? So the team rituals come in because team rituals and they really learn from SKO who is the CEO of this prospect Centar group. They consult the team. Their whole job is to help improve teamwork. She's a huge believer in team rituals and she came from me a few years ago to say, we've got this research, help us build on it. So we worked together for three years, months, surveys, interviews, a field study. We did all this work to kind of say, well, what's the role of team rituals in enhancing a team's life and team rituals to be a team ritual to count is it actually has to have a meaning and a purpose tied to some specific goal. Now there are different goals. It could be strategy development or it could be operational improvement or it could be relationship building.

So my connection is definitely in that last category, but in order to do a ritual well, it has to be regular, it has to be purposeful, it has to have the structure and you have to be able to keep measuring the output of it to see if it's working and not working. And we found that there was amazing results for the teams that had that high level use of these different kinds of rituals. And we looked at ones focused on personal information sharing as well as professional information sharing. They had huge boosts in their commitment to the team, their psychological safety, their job satisfaction, their sense of willingness to continue working for this company and not quit. So if I could just sort of tell every team, take a look, do you have rituals? Do you actually have things that people can name and say that we do that because of this for this reason and we do it when this is how often and we do it and this is how we execute it. If you can't say those things, then you probably don't have rituals and I would really encourage you to think harder about how to do that. And we'd published a new Harvard Business Review article that gives you kind of like a how to manual on how to execute them well.

Paul Sephton:

Is that one of those things which is far more social or far more, you mentioned both sides of the coin, informational and social. Is there sort of a starting block?

Constance Noonan Hadley:

It's the starting block that will help people do it and the starting block actually makes a difference. We don't have conclusive evidence of this, but this is based on my own years of experience in this field. People feel more comfortable starting with professional rituals or rituals, not focused on connection per se, but maybe about improving operations as a team. So those might be things like having a daily standup or they may be after a project, having a team retrospective and those are great. They're actually super valuable. Going back to your like how do you run a well-designed team for all sorts of reasons. Those are really good practices if they're done well. But I would say the balance of the evidence that I've seen would say that it's a personal rituals. So that would be celebrating a milestone for someone, whether it's a birthday or some other kind of event or sharing something about your cultural background like bringing in lunch for that honors someone's traditions or culture. Those actually tend to, I think, accelerate that sense of team commitment and job satisfaction more than the professional ones do. But often if you have a resistance skeptical group, I'd say start with professional. They're easier for people to accept upfront.

Paul Sephton:

And do you ever have any trouble for the leader who is exceptionally operational and just looking like you say for those productivity gains, how from your research that the productivity does come as a byproduct of having more of those social connections or rituals that aren't necessarily tied to what we would consider productive outputs of our work? But there are a lot of people who will come in and say, we're not a charity. We're here to do work. How do you try and convince someone to think differently when they've got that type of approach?

Constance Noonan Hadley:

Yeah, I mean if I have a one-on-one with that person, I mean I love having those conversations because with a few sets of questions, you can usually get people to come to that conclusion themselves. So when I ask them, when did you feel like you were working at your best? Tell me a story about that. Usually it's because they were part of a team where they had each other's backs. They were really well connected, they understood each other. And so then I'll say, well, how do you think that happened? What were the practices that got you to that point? In my line of work, I'm very sensitive to giving people free will. They have free will to do what they want and they've achieved this manager status. And so I'm not here to say, this is how you have to do your job. I'm just here to provide evidence that there's certain ways that lead to different outcomes that they may actually value.

So same thing with loneliness. A lot of people are like, I am not babysitting them. I don't have to help them make friends. And I'll say, okay, but tell me what you do care about and then I'll show the data that shows well those things happen. So think it's just a matter of using enough evidence and as well as enough buildup of self-awareness to get those managers to come around. Now that being said, if you're sitting on a team and you have a manager above you who's saying, forget this stuff, then I would say do the best you can to create those kinds of connections on your own with your colleagues. You can make your own happy hour tradition. You can do your own Friday lunch together and just do the things that you can control that will help you and your colleagues. And that's the other thing to emphasize here. We're not just serving ourselves when we do go to lunch with someone, we're actually helping them too. They feel more connected. They'll be able to do their job better. They'll know what to call you for. They'll be there when you need them and you'll be there for them when they need you. So start doing those kinds of things on your own. You may not be able to develop a full-blown team ritual, but you can start with smaller things.

Paul Sephton:

I think it's a type of thing that everyone starts out the year with good intent talking about the crossroads people have. And then usually once your strategy is locked and your budgets are in place, people just start to run and they forget to stop for a breath. So do you have any broad guidance for any managers in terms of the cadence they should be taking some type of audit with in terms of every six months, I should ask myself these five questions or give this some thought? Sometimes the writing's on the wall and long before that something sort of going a little bit south, but I think it's good to sort of put in some checks and stops to just take a pause and reflect

Constance Noonan Hadley:

As I do recommend that. And my heart goes out to particularly the middle management tier because they're just overwhelmed. So people I talk to are burned out feeling like they don't have that moment to take a breath. But the managers I know who are able to carve that out, whether it's a meditation time or a half an hour on Fridays where no one's allowed to get on their calendar. I do think you need to build in a routine of being able to reflect and assess because the time will escape you otherwise. I also think that you can learn from things like the atomic habits work that would say how do you build up to a new routine starting small, really small, small and quick wins to build on that momentum. I think that's really important as well versus we're going to now have 12 different rituals in our team and hoping that you have one left by the end of the year. I would say start just with one, make it achievable and six months later assess how that one's going and then maybe layer in a different one.

Paul Sephton:

I remember one thing that we have not discussed yet, which is on everyone's minds is the impact that everyone's new copilot or chat EPT relationship will have on workplace loneliness. If I'm probably giving 20 to 30 prompts a day to some form of agen ai, it could be 20 or 30 interactions less, which in some instances totally welcome. In other instances, I could turn around in six months and realize that I haven't actually spoken to all but two of my colleagues because I've just kind of had something machine-based to refer to. What are your predictions?

Constance Noonan Hadley:

I've been trying to really get up to speed on AI and where it's headed because I do think we have an important and short window to influence how it changes the way work gets done. And I did a project with Kate Kellogg looking at the role of AI in improving coaching from a manager to their team member. And that was a really wonderful optimistic kind of study because what we found is that if this is in performance management, if the AI could help that manager synthesize all that employees performance data and the things that we were looking at it, one company that works with social workers and thinking about what types of interventions they applied to their patients and how that worked out. If that AI can take away that maybe a couple hours worth of time, that manager would've had to spend looking through notes and interviewing and having conversations.

That's great as long as then that freed up time is used to actually interact with that employee and sit down and say, I noticed in the pattern here this was happening. Let's talk about that. How can I help you improve your outcomes? When the managers able to do that felt less burned out because they always wanted to be that kind of coach to their employees, but they just were frazzled for time and improve the relationship between the employee and the manager because the employees are also desperately craving that kind of coaching and personalized feedback. That's an example of how AI could make it work better, but it does require us remembering that that free time should not be just reinvested in more time with AI or with doing the work. It actually should be any free time in my opinion, should be reinvested in those kind of interpersonal interaction that AI can't provide for us.

And I think, again, this requires some foresight and some pre-planning so that people can build that time into the workflow. And I'm not sure that every company is thinking about it that way. I talk to companies, they're saying, this is great, we just get so much more work done with fewer people and I understand the cost savings involved in that, but I also think, well then you're just going to end up burning your people out more because they're not going to get that downtime or that interpersonal time that's going to really nourish them. The other thing that AI again can do too is it's such a magical tool from an analytics standpoint. It could help us not only be a manager coaching our employees, but help us get to know each other better so that maybe our meeting can be spent less on me figuring out what you know and you figuring out what I know, but actually building on that together and having real brainstorming conversation versus just a data dump towards each other. So if we use it and build on it, it can be a really important way for us to get back some of that key time.

Paul Sephton:

There's a lot of peril and promise ahead, but it'll be exciting to see how we land at the end of this year. And like you said, the change capacity or people's capacity and knowledge, workers' ability to manage that change, lean into it or make something positive of it. When it comes to experimenting, you mentioned sort of healthy experimentation. I think often people will try and implement good ideas and they fizzle out and it ends up feeling potentially for team members, there just wasn't enough care in it or it was a token effort or that it didn't actually have the intended positive meaning. So what's your sort of guidance to managers in terms of try something or try that properly for a set amount of time and then either make a call to disregard it, communicate that you've decided to no longer do it, or how quickly do we move on to our next ritual instead of implementing all 12 at once at the start of the year, try one. And then where do we judge the sort of success or not of it?

Constance Noonan Hadley:

I think so much of that is doing exactly what you said, which is in advance having a game plan to decide whether to keep it or delete it. Unfortunately, people will say, well, let's just try it. But then there isn't that closing of the loop to say, is this going to happen? And that's when things fade away. So for a ritual, I would give it at least three months, ideally six months because it does take a while to get into a new routine. I would say like, okay, so you're going to set these maybe a marker at three months and a marker at six months, but you're also going to have something else along the way that will keep it top of mind. So maybe it's that pulse check, it's just like a smiley face scale. How does this ritual making you feel as you leave it just to keep the data flow coming in.

And then when you have your assessment, you can say, okay, well this is what the trend is looking like. Let's make a decision, keep going or change it or delete it. And then it just becomes something that no one can feel like was a waste of time because even if it doesn't continue, you can see why and you can see what happened and hopefully you've now also had a way to codify what did work even if the whole thing wasn't successful. And you try that in the next iteration. And again, these things sound really easy for me to say, but I know how hard they are to execute. So there are templates and things. Cosmic centers actually is a template you can follow to try to make it easier. You don't also, or ask chatt BT to set me up in a format that will allow me to assess whether this is working for the next six months and prompt me every week to check in about it. I mean, you just have to put a little bit of an investment upfront into getting a system going and then let the system work.

Paul Sephton:

One last question because I'm conscious of time. Are there one or two things that you sort of wish people would stop doing right now that you want to fix? Or if it's not about fixing something, one or two things where you're just sort of like, this is the destination that I would ultimately have all knowledge work is moving towards in your utopian version of how work looks?

Constance Noonan Hadley:

Yes. I think the one that I would say is actually borrowing a fabulous article title by Nick Epley and colleagues called Mistakenly Seeking Solitude. So I think the one thing that people that I talk to in my research are doing is psyching themselves out of talking to other people or engaging socially. I mean, there's this whole phenomenon where people will post how excited they are when plans get canceled on social media and it's like reinforcing this idea that we don't want to go out or we don't want to talk to other people, or people think it's awkward and people wouldn't enjoy it and I'm better off not doing it. And I would say if you can change that mindset into I think this is good for me and good for other people and just try it. Nick's work would have people talking to strangers at a bus stop or on the subway, for example, in the work environment. You could just literally say to somebody, even a side chat in a Zoom meeting with somebody that you don't know, well, hey, how's it going? Just want to tell you, I really appreciate that comment you made. Start just reaching out more and you'd be amazed how much it's enjoyable for you and then brings you closer to other people. So don't get into that. Shell break out of

Paul Sephton:

It. I think it's a great thing that anybody can adopt regardless of what industry they're in, what level they're at, whether they're leading, no one and an individual contributor or head of a massive organization. It just sort of comes back to the humanness of work and how ultimately at the end of the day we're here to do a job, but we're all still people.

Constance Noonan Hadley:

And again, the last thing I would say to encourage people is it just makes work more fun. It really does. I mean, we're going to have to work not only for financial and economic reasons, but also because it's also a human need. Human needs go down to things such as a need for accomplishment that work provides and a need for belonging that the social relationships provide. So if you can do both at once, it's just more fun.

Paul Sephton:

I think maybe people think that the accomplishment thing is the only end game with work and they forget how big of a piece that belonging is over the course of a think how long a career is for anybody. And if you have a missing puzzle piece of belonging that's a large part of your workplace satisfaction that could just potentially be so fulfilled but is absent in a lot of people's day to days.

Constance Noonan Hadley:

That's right.

Paul Sephton:

Well, thank you so much for the time today. I really have enjoyed the conversation and appreciate all the insights that you've given us.

Constance Noonan Hadley:

I have too, thank you so much for having this conversation and letting me talk about all these things I'm so excited about.