CEOs, let's reimagine connection at work.

This month, I was a participant in a debate on Quiet quitting at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos. The workforce is changing rapidly, and it strikes me that as the leaders have been asking a lot of the appropriate questions. the pros and cons of remote working The risks and potential presented by AI as well as the need to build more inclusive and sustainable organizations.

However, one issue is deserving to be given more consideration: if our workforce is changing, technology is changing as well as post-pandemic behavior and standards are changing...don't us as leaders need to adapt?

There is an entire generation of digital natives entering the working world. They were raised creating and sharing videos , not making calls or texts as they consider TikTok or YouTube their primary source for information. When it comes to their private lives they're connected and also extremely engaged.

Yet in their work lives, it's a different story. There are dramatic reductions in engagement and employee satisfaction in employees who work remotely Gen Z and younger millennials. Only four out of ten youngsters who work remotely or in hybrid settings know clearly what is expected of them at work, and more than half of Gen Z employees are ambivalent or unengaged at work. When we consider employee engagement as the most important measure of workforce efficiency This has enormous impact on every business as well as every business's profit.

What's causing this disconnection? At work, as well as in our lives, we all want to belong to an entity larger than us. We have an innate need to be part of something bigger, and to experience an identity that is transparent, unfiltered, and real. But the more of our workforce is digitally dispersed and AI-connected and ad-hoc, the harder it becomes to experience true connections every single day. Particularly when we haven't evolved the way we interact to meet our future workforce. We still ask our employees to read through a mountain of documentation or write lengthy emails and take part in inefficient gatherings. We learn about layoffs as well as company priorities through comms made up of scripts and automated that they could be produced by ChatGPT. Our only insight as leaders have on this is through surveys of engagement that are cookie-cutter and live events that have low tune-in and high drop-off percentages, as well as occasionally snarky chat or Q&A.

The traditional managerial model is ineffective. It's time to adapt how our leaders present themselves and communicate with our employees. Just as we are focused on improving the skills of our employees with regard to evolving demographic, population and technology trends, we also need to upgrade our skills as leaders to better create trust and connections on a large.

I've tried a lot of this during the past couple of years . Here are the skills I've been learning and applying, that I believe can assist us in presenting differently and lead more effectively:

 1. Be real, be you.

When the epidemic, I participated in a global town hall from my parents' house in Flint, Michigan -- tired and slumbering in my velour pajamas, with my son, who is a toddler, and my grandma shuffling in and out of the background.

It might have been my most successful communication in my life.

Why? because it wasn't scripted chaotic, vulnerable, and messy. We tend to gravitate to "us against us versus them" interactions when we work at a company, particularly in times of stress and the need to overcome. It's so easy to think of "leadership" as an unnamed machines that have no face. Video-first and visually oriented with your communications can be a potent deterrent. This forces you to shed the protection and mask of written and edited comms. One of the best ways to make it clear is to appear just as you really are.

In the end, there is a lot of instances of leaders being vulnerable and it backfiring...but I think that in the vast majority of these instances, the issue was that the leader was performing too much. It is important to allow to allow that part of yourself to fail when you are in front of your colleagues. We all have flaws that are humans. We all wish to see our leaders to be courageous. It inspires us to be more like them.

 2. Beginning by asking the "why ."

As with many other leaders, I've made difficult decisions over the course of the year. From layoffs and executive changes to re-organizing and shutting down projects to improve efficiency. It is my job to make the hard decisions, which are not popular and implement changes quickly across our organization.

In a growing number of cases, employees are wanting to know the reasoning behind their decision-making processes, not just the "what" but the "why". It is a need to comprehend the larger competition or market context as well as the way in which trade-offs are that are balanced and weighted, as well as the process of who was involved and when.

The conventional comms strategy would say that when you're faced with an important communication issue with limited time, start with the "what" before getting to the point and needed actions. However, I've been more successful in getting people to embrace a difficult choice when I view my employees as the key stakeholders who deserve to understand the situation.

Therefore, starting with "why" is a first guideline for communications at all levels . There are of course constraints to being fully transparent (legal, PR, governance, customer risk) however I've observed that, in the majority of cases, the perceived barriers to transparency can be described as. Perceived. People will not always agree with your decisions, and you could say that if they disagree it, then you're probably not doing the job you're supposed to do. They will however accept and respect your decisions in the beginning when you understand the reasons behind them.

 3. Spend money on in-person meetings, and get personal.

Yes, I can see the irony in the CEO of a video company declaring this. One of the biggest experiences over the past few months is that we've waited too long and weren't deliberate enough in connecting the teams we have in the real world.

In January, just a few days following layoffs, the company held a kickoff for our company in NYC. The event brought in employees from more than twelve nations. Our employees were based in Ukraine that took trains as well as planes and automobiles to get there. We ditched the typical event party confetti, and went with the more casual look and a low-cost budget. It was one of the most energizing and needed investment decisions I've ever made.

This is made even more effective when, as leaders, you take a flight and meet your team where they are. We have an entirely distributed executive team spread across eight locations that range from Seattle from Seattle to Switzerland. Most were hired in the last year and they are relatively new and are only beginning to get to know each other as a group. To help accelerate this gelling, we started hosting offsites at the homes of each leader's city. We hung out with our CFO's mom around her fire pit in Vermont. Our Head of Sales was wearing his apron, and we made frittatas to eat breakfast. We held working sessions at our Head of Product's dining table.

The pandemic gave us a literal window into each other's homes and private lives . If we can tap into this, and integrate it into our day-to-day and work, we can have the chance to build stronger, more connected and higher-performing teams.

 4. You can go from "lean back" to "lean forward" encounters.

An essential communication ability is the capability to create "lean forward" experiences instead of "lean back" broadcasts. Human focus spans are shrinking (now lower than 8 seconds which is less than the length of the length of a goldfish!). However, we communicate by one-to-many communications, either through an email you read or an extremely produced town hall you sit back and watch.

We can see this burden on engagement surfacing in our own statistics and the amount of time to drop off from watching videos has decreased over the past few years. If we don't change the way we approach it, tuning out will seriously hinder our ability to keep our teams in sync and efficient.

It is crucial changing our perspective and openness to new things. We have a new generation entering the workforce who are ahead of us in their ability to create and capture rich and authentic data. They're ahead of us because they're not subject to the limitations that our generation faced for decades in traditional communications methods at work.

It is said that employees do not quit jobs. They leave managers. The CEOs are, in fact, the most effective managers and in an research study that included more than 113,000 executives, the number one factor for successful management is the trust of their employees. Leaders must train us how to conduct ourselves in more authentic, fascinating and authentic methods. I'm betting that executives who are open to this new world will be far better at managing the future generation of employees. They will better inform and engage distributed teams, align people to greater productivity, and establish solid relationships that result in outstanding results. They will stop communicating more but instead make connections more effectively.