How to put positivity back into your work relationships
After a year of remote work, we’re moving towards a ‘new normal’ that seems likely to be a hybrid: We’ll stay home to tick off ‘task focused’ stuff (and eat cereal out of the box), then gather ‘face to face’ for work requiring collaboration or creativity.
Nice in theory, but a year of ‘apart time’ has served up a perverse double-whammy: We feel both isolated from, and increasingly irritated by, our co-workers! And it’s not just our tempers but our output that’s suffering…
To achieve successful collaboration and creativity, you first need to build a foundation of trust and psychological safety. To share an idea is to share part of yourself – you’re asking someone to ‘tread softly because you tread on my dreams’. Yet most of us would rather trust a herd of stampeding elephants than our closest colleagues right now.
Certainly at The Culture Experiment we’ve noticed ourselves getting a little scratchy lately. Striving not to take things personally (we know we love each other really!) we’ve tried to dig into what’s causing the empathy gap.
- Remote work means we can’t see the effort each other is putting in. Conversely, it feeds peer paranoia: Nothing can feel more passive aggressive than receiving emails sent at 5am by up-and-thrusting Kevin.
- We miss all the micro-interactions that sustain relationships – the body language, the shared office experiences, the bantz that builds rapport.
- The increase of intermediated communication (endless email and telecoms) sky-rockets the frequency of miscommunications and misunderstandings. (Who hasn’t agonised over an ill-placed exclamation mark? Or received a ‘happy face’ emoji and thought, “are they taking the p*ss?”)
![](https://thecultureexperiment.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Frowning-man-laptop-1024x683.jpeg)
Now insert some evolutionary context: Human communication has functioned face-to-face for 200,000 years. The telephone is less than a 150 years-old, while email is, in tech terms, a toddler. (Easy to forget, but the first US President to use email was Bill Clinton in the ‘90s!) No wonder wires get crossed – it’s a minor miracle we’re still talking to each other at all!
So go easy on yourself if you’ve started entertaining dark thoughts about your work-buddies. It’s not you, it’s the context. But given this context, any guesses as to what your first ‘hybrid’ collaboration and creativity session might generate? Inspired ideas, or blood on the walls?
![](https://thecultureexperiment.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Caveman-eats-laptop-1024x683.jpeg)
Whether your return to work seems imminent, or a lifetime away, try some of these experiments to build the trust you need to do great collaborative work together.