So when they tell you that the risks and dangers are overstated, and not to worry about it, because the benefits will surely outweigh everything else, come back and remember that the wealthy said the same thing about slavery. For them, the benefits did outweigh everything else. That wasn’t the case for people who were different from them.
Have employees given up on trying to change the workplace? If that many people don’t bother to speak up, that’s a condemnation of workplace culture. We all say we want engaged employees, yet many of them are disengaged to the point of not bothering to try to make a difference.
Perhaps this is another compelling reason to provide management and communication training to all employees, as we’ll soon be managing our AI tools. Knowing how to communicate clearly would make a massive difference in creating that “relationship” at work.
I stopped my quote at that word “intentional” for a reason. I use that word often in this context. Whether you have teammates who are fully remote, hybrid, or just located in a different office from you, everything needs to be done intentionally. Communication, meetings, goals, expectations, etc., all need to be purposely set. If you want your team to feel free to disconnect after hours or on weekends, then you have to do that intentionally. If you allow work to creep into every hour of every day, or get lazy about communication, or demand an immediate response to an email late at night, even one time, you set the example that your team follows.
There are so many more interesting things we could be talking about. Yes, we are all here to connect and learn from each other about our work, but it doesn’t have to be the beginning and end of every conversation. Maybe instead of “what do you do,” I’m going to start asking folks what one thing they have learned this week that has them most excited? No offense to your job, but that conversation is going to be more interesting, in my humble opinion.
What have you learned this week?
When you read some of the statistics about email, meetings, interruptions, etc., it’s hard not to see the same glaring red flag that Sharlyn sees. We might suck at communicating.