Satisfy Your Employees’ Desire To Connect

Happy Monday! It’s John Garrett coming to you with another episode of Green Apple Slices week two of 2018. We’re on fire here with my co-host, partner-in-crime, the group leader of all things snowy in Canada for Sage — Rachel Fisch.

Rachel: We did have a white Christmas, yes. Hey, John. How are you?

John: Great, great, doing well, doing well. Every Monday, we get together and chat and talk about an article that I’d find online and this one we found on Forbes and it was by Todd Richardson called “Satisfy your employee’s desire to connect,” which I was like, “Wow. That’s exactly what the Green Apple message is all about right there.”

Rachel: For sure.

John: Yeah. And so apparently, he’s with the founder of Amplify and they’ve been doing some studies and he finds that the concept of connectivity is a key driver to overall employee engagement, which I was like, “Wow, so there’s science behind it, perfect.”

Rachel: There is. So I think that people naturally want to connect to each other. And I mean even in the ways of social media for as much as it can disconnect you from the person beside you, it really is meant to connect people to other people outside of who they would normally see on a regular basis. So what I thought was really interesting is just the whole concept of when you’re talking to firms and talking to companies who feel that, first of all, that it’s up to the employees whether they engaged or not, which we’ll talk about next week, or feeling the need to force people to connect with each other. Apparently, that doesn’t work so well.

John: Yeah. If they’re like me, they turn into like a five-year-old.

Rachel: But here, he’s got a really good point of just kind of facilitating or enabling these connections to happen by having common spaces, common kitchen, common work spaces. Those types of things that allow people to connect with each other. Because if you go into some offices and it’s like a maze of desks where you could probably go to your desk and do your work and leave and not ever actually see anybody or pass anybody or need to connect with anybody.

John: Totally.

Rachel: So those are the types of things, those are just a couple of examples of how employers can just facilitate it. They don’t need to force it. They just need to kind of allow it to happen on its own.

John: Right, right. And that’s the thing. It’s just giving permission because especially in the accounting and legal profession, I mean these are people that are not rule breakers by default. So they’re looking for permission to do things rather than asking forgiveness after. So yeah, so especially a lot of the listeners, yeah, you have permission. Just go do it.

Rachel: John is giving you permission.

John: Right, exactly. If anyone has a problem, you can email me at Rachel@ — but absolutely. I mean if you’re a manager or even a supervisor level and you sort of management role, then you need to make sure that people know that. That you explicitly say it because people by default don’t automatically think that.

Rachel: Right. And they also follow what you do and not what you say necessarily. So showing — being an example of it is also really good. One of the things that I did really like that he called out was just talking about when employees actually starts a job or the first day. I know one of the things that Deloitte did for example was that everybody was assigned a buddy. So somebody who does work at the organization already just to kind of share some of those things that maybe aren’t in the employee handbook or in the benefits package like how to work the coffee machine or…

Also, that person naturally becomes the first person that the new employee then goes to whenever they do have questions. So kind of introducing that to people right from the very first day is a really great way to get that started.

John: Right, absolutely. No, those are really great ideas. And another way that he said, people want to connect to each other, but they also want to connect to a cause that’s greater than themselves or even greater than the firm that they’re working for, which is definitely a huge thing nowadays with especially the younger generations that are graduating college now.

Rachel: Those young kids.

John: Yeah, yeah. I don’t even know what they’re doing. But yeah, I mean he uses the example of Starbucks which right on their application says, “Careers at Starbucks, connect with something bigger.” I mean it says it right there because you’re not just serving cups of coffee. You’re actually part of the community and doing community service projects and other things like that, making a world a better place. And so if there’s a way that you can get people in your firm involved in some charities, I know some firms around the country that do some really great things whether it’d be community involvement or Habitat for Humanity.

Some firms have like a whole day where no one works across the country and they’re all doing community service. So it’s cool things like that that you can feel like you’re a part of something bigger.

Rachel: For sure. And sometimes that can be kind of the vision or mission statement within the firm itself if you’ve got kind of those lofty goals. Because some people are driven by professional success of whatever, but I do definitely think that it kind of takes everything a whole step further when you can identify something outside of the firm too.

John: Right.

Rachel: So all that to say, “I agree with you, John.”

John: Right. And so there we go. There we go. So yeah, so that’s it, everybody. So have a good rest of the week and you can check out the article if you’d like to read the whole thing at greenapplepodcast.com. You can follow us on Twitter at Rachel’s @FischBooks. I’m @RecoveringCPA or together @GreenApplePod. And yeah, you guys have a good rest of the week. Take care, Rachel.

Rachel: Awesome. You too, John. Talk to you later.